Eclipse: “A time when someone or something starts to seem less successful or important, because another person or thing has become more successful or important than they are” (Macmillan Dictionary). The word comes from ekleipsis, which in ancient Greek means abandonment. We are all celestial bodies, alone in space. We are susceptible to each other’s gravitational pull. We can emanate tremendous heat and power. We can enlighten each other. We circle around each other admiringly, on incomprehensible, invisible orbits, a beautiful, cosmic dance that could surely last for eternity. A great friendship, wrote Martin Buber, “breaches the barriers of a lofty solitude, subdues its strict law, and throws a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe." We look for those bridges everywhere. We cling to whatever makes us feel less full of dread, including work, alcohol, sex, sports, spirituality. More than three-quarters of Americans believe in angels. Because there is just so much terrifying space out there. When asked what humans are most afraid of, Kierkegaard would reply: “We are most afraid of nothing.” We cling to each other. And inevitably at some point our shadows put each other in the shade. Our personal orbits clash, or one gets skewed by the strong magnetic field of the other. We lose our freedom, our sense of self. Maybe we even collide, or end up spewing smouldering, deadly meteors at each other in the divorce courts, or becoming engulfed in each other's flames in front of a live TV audience. Love can tear us apart. Faced with either being alone or risking getting burned from being too close, many will willingly settle for some kind of cosy compromise midway between the two, half in relationship and half out, a standoff—somewhat connected, partially married, semi-sedated. But perhaps it’s possible to have a different arrangement, one that involves learning how to occupy two polarities at the same time. And one polarity depends on the other: We can’t learn to engage with others deeply and meaningfully unless we are also prepared to learn to engage deeply and meaningfully with our very own self. That requires an encounter with our loneliness; a willingness, every day, to confront the unforgiving, ever-moving edge of our isolation. To step into the unknown.
Writes Irvin Yalom: “Each of us is alone in existence. Yet aloneness can be shared in such a way that love compensates for the pain of isolation.” Friendships, partners, crushes, infatuations, hookups, one-offs—they all come and go. We give and we take love along the way. But your relationship with yourself? That, my friend, is for ever. Can you accept who you are, and who you are becoming? Can you live with all the light and shade, the self-criticism, the shame and the guilt and the awful memories? Can you love all the imperfections and faults and weaknesses in you? And in other people, too? And can you do all this knowing for sure that we will never really know ourselves, and never really know another? The historic blood red moon last night is not an apocalyptic omen signalling the end of days. It is not a reason to get spooked, hesitate, and lose out, as Nicias did in the Second Battle of Syracuse in 413. It is instead a good omen. Maybe you have been eclipsed. You feel hurt, betrayed, disappointed, unappreciated, abandoned, ignored, rejected, ghosted. The sun will rise again, it will be a new day, and you will see everything differently, as if for the first time. The red moon has already faded, but its message remains indelibly etched across the sky: never again will you allow anyone or anything to eclipse your relationship with you. “If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I?" In 1817, in a letter to his brother, the poet John Keats wrote about how people of achievement had a quality he called “negative capability.” They were capable, he said, “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative capability is an acknowledgement of complexity, a mature respect of life’s shades of grey, an understanding that despite what the strident headline, indignant tweet or demanding placard says, the situation is probably not quite so simple.
“We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.” A digression: Do you feel lucky today? Richard Wiseman, a magician turned popular psychologist, conducted some research on luck. He advertised for people who considered themselves very lucky, or very unlucky and received many replies. The lucky people seemingly had led charmed, successful, happy lives. They were always in the right place at the right time, and good things inevitably just happened to fall in their lap. The unlucky people? The opposite. An extraordinary catalogue of calamities, disastrous romances, failed businesses, missed connections, lost harvests. Wiseman conducted a series of tests on these people. One was to count the number of photos in a newspaper. The unlucky people took a few minutes to complete the task. The lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because on page 2, half the page was devoted to a notice that said, in large letters: “Stop counting: There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The “unlucky” people, blinded by the certainty of the task, never saw it. According to Wiseman, people make their own luck. The house of uncertainty holds no fear for lucky people. Which side are you on? Our brains have two hemispheres: the intuitive, holistic, creative, transcendent “right brain,” and the more logical, rigid, pedantic, detail-focused “left brain.” Iain McGilchrist calls the former the “Master” and the latter the “Emissary.” The problem, he says, is that the Emissary is supposed to be in service to the Master, but somehow he has taken over the controls. As a result, he has profoundly changed us—and our world. All power, says McGilchrist, now rests with the Emissary “who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master...is led away in chains.” (A simplistic binary split of the brain into left and right perhaps shows a lack of negative capability—it ignores all the shades of grey matter. But we'll stick with it.) Instead of working together, our bird-brained inner accountant turned on our wise and thoughtful inner poet and, in a desperate ontological battle, the latter was slain. The poet, needless to say, embraced negative capability; she lived it. The accountant however, clipboard, ruler and calculator in hand, can tolerate only certainty. He has created a fragmented, western world of technology, mechanisation and bureaucracy, a world of alienation, where love is hard to find, and beauty gets bulldozed, a world of spreadsheets instead of sonnets, a world where everything is measured, itemized, indexed, where the little picture matters and the big picture doesn’t. Einstein had a sign hanging in his office which read: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Doubt in the consulting room The Emissary’s hand can be seen in every detail of our lives—in tax returns, Ofsted reports, market research. In doomed attempts to deconstruct jokes or works of art. And, as I wrote earlier this week, in the field of mental health. The Emissary wants to shoehorn your troubles into a neat, clearly-labelled pigeonhole. He wants to eradicate your symptoms with a drug and, if you insist, a bit of talking in the form of some short-term cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). A little adjustment to your levels, a bit of soldering under the bonnet, and you should be good to go—back to your spreadsheets. If it were that simple, we would not be human. On the first page of the introduction in her book The Impossibility of Knowing, psychotherapist Jackie Gerrard writes: “I am sure that I, like many of my colleagues, started my training eager to learn and to know, and I have subsequently spent the years post qualification learning that I do not ‘know,’ cannot ‘know,’ and, indeed, should not ‘know’ . . . by saying I do not ‘know,’ I am continually endeavouring to hold a state of mind that can tolerate remaining open, bearing uncertainty, and avoiding, wherever possible, omnipotence and omniscience.” Not “knowing” is not the same as indecision or ignorance. In Tales of Un-knowing, existential therapist Ernesto Spinelli says therapists should aspire to be un-knowing—as opposed to “unknowing”—they should “attempt to remain as open as possible to whatever presents itself in our relational experience.” The Emissary therapist reaches for theories, models, personality tests and questionnaires about your mental state so that he can enter your score on a spreadsheet. He reaches for the manual to find a clinical diagnosis such as “generalized anxiety disorder” or “oppositional defiance disorder” and some techniques to make it go away. American existential therapist Irving Yalom marvels that anyone can take diagnoses seriously, adding: “Even the most liberal system of psychiatric nomenclature does violence to the being of another. If we relate to people believing that we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nurture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcends category.” The Master therapist, by contrast, see you—all the vital parts, all of you. All her senses are alive to you and your experience of distress. This level of presence and empathy was memorably expressed by British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who wrote that every therapeutic session should be approached “without memory and without desire.” Even the therapist’s wish for their client to be, say, less depressed is, according to Bion, an imposition that will cloud that therapist’s mind. He believed that in every session there had to be a genuine open-mindedness and freedom. All too often therapist and client conspire to flee from uncertainty. The therapist who claims to be “sorted” might be cut off from their own vulnerability and woundedness, and perhaps not be the best guide to accompany a client as they traverse a landscape of despair. Integrative psychotherapist Diana Voller writes: “The tension of the experience of being in uncertainty brings the person of the therapist well and truly back into the therapy.” The therapist, too, needs “the scariness and excitement of being willing to be in the unknown, allowing oneself to be temporarily overwhelmed, feel stupid for a while...gaining new perspectives and growing.” (I am grateful to Voller for a presentation she made on negative capability years ago in London—thank you.) Increasing your negative capability So perhaps we would be better people if we could cultivate a little more negative capability in our lives. There'd be more good things like luck, love, empathy. Negative capability transforms a profane world into one of poetry. For Keats, ways to cultivate more negative capability were: “books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music out of doors played by someone I do not know.” Voller suggests that films, TV, art, literature and the theatre are all “rich everyday resources for choosing to be temporarily unsettled and ready to be ultimately changed by other ways of seeing things.” Here are 9 tips for a greater capacity for uncertainty: 1. Have therapy There’s no better way to experience the discomfort of uncertainty, to encounter those frontiers of yourself that you have for long retreated from, than to be a client. The consulting room is a safe place to explore your distress, your history, your way of being in the world, all your secrets and shadows. Processing such dark matter affords some control over it rather than the reverse. 2. Keep a journal Another great way of exploring, of cultivating a better relationship with our self—or rather, disparate selves. Start the conversation. 3. Improvise Now and again, put away the instruction manual, or the sheet music, or the cookbook, and just do it. 4. Meet new people Hurl yourself into unfamiliar social situations. Interact with a wide range of people. Richard Wiseman wrote of how some of his “lucky” participants often sought out ways to force them to meet different people. One noticed that whenever he went to a party, he tended to talk to the same type of people. To disrupt this routine, he now thinks of a colour before a social event and then speaks to people wearing that colour of clothing. 5. Get lost Take a different route to work, take your watch off, travel without a map, go somewhere new on holiday, camp in the wilderness, explore a very different country, travel alone. Develop a sense of what psychoanalyst Nina Coltart called xenophilia. Lose yourself in nature. Gaze at trees, clouds, thunderstorms. Waste time. 6. Spend time with children Learn from their streams of consciousness and ability to play, and to be spontaneous and joyful and un-selfconscious. They haven’t yet learned, as we have, to filter, to not see. Negative capability is the antidote to old age. Viewpoints, like arteries or neural pathways, can become clogged, fewer, narrower, less fluid. 7. Have new experiences Sign up for that retreat, workshop, meetup.com event. Do things that you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t because they scare you a little. Try different genres of art and music and film and food. 8. Be with your body Dance. Play. Sing. Act. Exercise. Move. Do yoga. Touch and be touched. Our psychology affects our body—the reverse can also be true: putting your body into unfamiliar, freeing positions can also free your mind. 9. Stop making lists! Ultimately, negative capability is a stance, a state of mind, an awareness. A willingness to give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you, as American mythologist Joseph Campbell so succinctly put it. It’s not easy. There are times when we need to be on autopilot, or seek refuge from the world under a giant metaphorical duvet. But we are only fully alive in those fleeting moments when we are brave enough to throw away all the old rules and maps and guidebooks and lists and embrace living in a state of uncertainty, eyes wide open to the world, engaging our fluid self with a fluid environment in original, creative and spontaneous ways. I’m pretty sure there some truth in that. But of course, I can’t be certain. Are you going away in August? Anywhere nice? To a happy place? Does it involve coastlines, cocktails, cookouts, and colourful clothes that you wouldn’t dream of wearing back home? Will you take in majestic vistas, far-flung sunsets, the wonders of the world? (Or will you not take them in at all but simply take pictures of them for boasting purposes on Instagram?) Do holidays make you happy? One study in Holland found that happiness comes from planning a holiday. The anticipation of a trip boosted happiness for eight weeks prior to departure. On returning home, however, for most people the good cheer quickly fades away, along with and the suntan and the memories. Back among your quotidian hassles, the limoncello doesn’t quite taste the same. Maybe you hate the summer anyway—you suffer perhaps from reverse seasonal affective disorder and your mood falls as the temperature rises. So what does make you happy? The size of your bank balance, your physical beauty, your number of Facebook friends? If so, you will never feel as if you have enough. You will never be satisfied. Is it about having security, knowledge and religion, as a 1938 U.K. survey suggested? Or humour, leisure and security, according to the same survey today? Being a heavy metal fan? Being playful, mindful, forgiving and compassionate—and getting the basics right like diet, exercise and sleep? Yes. These are all good daily, tried-and-tested practices. But true happiness runs deeper. It arises perhaps from good relationships. Having a sense of purpose and meaning. Becoming who you are, who you were meant to be—fulfilling some of your true potential. Some kind of spiritual practice and belief. A feeling of connection—with yourself, with others, and with something larger. Love. In the end, maybe it's all about love. Whatever happiness is for you, here are 5 tips to pump it up: • Change your attitude. Happiness is a choice. You can be bitter about all the terrible things that have happened to you. Or you can think good thoughts and feel good feelings about yourself and others by fostering an attitude of compassion. When your best-laid plans end up in tatters, laugh. Raise your game by all means, but lower your expectations, too—being a perfectionist is a recipe for disappointment and unhappiness. Count your blessings: cultivating a stance of gratitude really helps. Appreciate everything around you, right here, right now. Be generous. Give people a break; the benefit of the doubt. Smile. Feel the love. As Victor Frankl wrote in a supreme book on his experiences in the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.” • Be around happy people. For better and for worse, emotions are contagious, and you reap what you sow. Seek out people who make you feel good. By the same token, avoid unhappy people, or people who put bad energy and unhappiness into the world, or indeed advice from such people, including dog-torturer turned U.S. Army dark arts coach Martin Seligman who churns out self-help books on “positive psychology” and professes to be an expert on “authentic happiness.” This calls for a random quote from Immanuel Kant: “He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” The kind of energy you put forth into the world is exactly the kind of energy you shall attract and receive. • Go to happy places. What is your happiest place on earth? How often do you go there? You can take yourself there anytime at all with a safe place mindfulness meditation. And go to actual happy places, too, such as inspirational, wild landscapes. In nature, we can find our true nature. So go green. Or go to Switzerland. In May I wrote about the World Happiness Report, which declared the 10 happiest countries in the world to be: 1. Switzerland 2. Iceland 3. Denmark 4. Norway 5. Canada 6. Finland 7. Netherlands 8. Sweden 9. New Zealand 10. Australia The U.S. is 15th on the list; the U.K. 21st. On the bottom of the pile are Syria, Burundi and Togo. The 10 happiest nations are generally egalitarian and collectively-minded in spirit--inequality breeds discontent. As Hector astutely notes in the whimsical novel Hector and the Search for Happiness: “It’s harder to be happy in a country run by bad people.” • Grow old. Countless studies show that in general, happiness follows a U-bend across the adult life span, regardless of factors like wealth, employment status, presence or absence of children and so on. Perhaps you set out on your grown-up journey in reasonably good cheer, full of hopes and dreams. But sooner or later all that potential and possibility gets mugged by reality. And one day you find yourself trapped in an unsatisfying job, marriage or town, struggling to pay the bills, stressed, sandwiched between looking after your kids and looking after your parents. You are miserable. You are at the bottom of the U-bend. “And you may ask yourself,” as the Talking Heads song goes, “how did I get here?” One study of happiness data in 72 countries reported that the global average bottom of the U-bend is 46 years old (though this of course masks enormous variety and individual differences). But then, after a midlife crisis or two, things get better. Your physiological decline is outweighed by your psychological advance. The death of ambition is outweighed by the birth of acceptance. Instead of trying to live up to other people’s standards or expectations, you fully accept who you are. What Jungian James Hollis calls your “provisional personality” fades away, along with all the delusions of grandeur and internalised “rules” about how you, others and life “should” be. You start to play your own game. You start to love life again. I see lots of clients going through the vortex of these kinds of transformations, painful breakdowns of various kinds that in the end turn out to be profound breakthroughs. I believe a “midlife crisis” can happen at any age, once in a lifetime or many times. Or, for the unfortunate few, never at all. • Stop trying to be happy all the time. It’ll only make you unhappy. As Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking: “In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions—or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.” And anyway, is that what you really want, to be nothing more than a big yellow smiley face? There is so much more to life than being only happy. Note: world of therapy is on holiday for the rest of August, returning with a “Weekly news round-up” on Friday September 4. Have a great summer! Make it a summer of love!
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AuthorJohn Barton is a counsellor, psychotherapist, blogger and writer with a private practice in Marylebone, Central London. To contact, click here. |