It happened years ago. He
remembered a growing sensation of detachment from others, a disconnect or a
turning inwards. One evening, while reading the familiar adventures of Calvin
and Hobbes, it settled on his soul like a dull gray cloud. Everything dimmed,
everything slightly lost its colour. No prospects held the happiness or
excitement that they previously did. His youthful joie-de-vivre had gone out
like a light – how fragile it proved when once it felt like a never-ending
stream of joy that could take on the world’s problems and myriad sadnesses and
change them, heal them. It left, without any warning. Like a spell. Or an
excorcism of a happy ghost. He had suddenly, at that moment, became depressed.
Chemical imbalances in the mind or in the soul? He did not know. It would become the
greatest mystery of his life – his first real encounter with the mystery of
ourselves.
What was
worst for him was the loneliness that it created. He didn’t have the words to
tell those who loved him what he was feeling or the words he would normally
have used now seemed crude and inappriate for what he felt. I’m scared
and I don’t know why! He’d been scared while watching a horror movie or on a
roller coaster but this was not the same. This was not at all like the despair
that he was now feeling. Sitting face to face with his mother – the one who
knew him, the one who made him – he desperately asked, “When you look in my
eyes can you see what I’m feeling?” Whether she really saw anything there or
not only she can tell but she responded with the wisdom that only a mother is
capable of, “you look afraid.” It would seem simple response to some but what
she had tried to give him was a sense that she was able to see, and to some extent share, the ethereal
anxiety that plagued him. He felt for a moment that her vindication could set him free from that cage
in which we are all trapped - the cage of subjective experience. But
his indescribable malaise was to be his own. And he knew that if he didn’t own it
that it would own him.
And so
years past but the anxiety remained, unpredictably volatile. It seemed to come
and go with the seasons. During the summer it waned and in the winter it waxed.
In a way it gave him some comfort to feel that he had developed this extra
sense of connection to the natural environment around him though it cost him,
at times, the joyful ease that other’s took for granted.
He saw how
the same species of malaise had won battles against others, how they had not been able to express the mystery of their secret pain to the outside world. He saw how some had
found expression through real physical pain. Cutters. But he would not allow
himself to fall to that terrible depth. He would find solace and validation in the
storms and winds that the seasons had to offers. Like some inverted Romantic, he
felt that nature did not invoke in him powerful emotion – he already had enough
of that – but that it had the potential to subtly validate the what was locked
inside him.
* * *
Watch him
now as he trudges through the snow, slips on the ice but not fall. Watch him stand in the
wind as the tails of his coat flap and wrap aroung him like the sails
of a ship come loose in a storm. But has become master of the ocean of his
turbullent unconscious. For we are all the pilots of crafts that float minuscule upon
the memories and emotions of our oceanic selves. Standing there waiting for the bus in
the freezing rain, he smiles. He does not curse the sting of the rain on his face
nor the frost accumulating in his beard but thanks them for he has for years
been blasted by the icy winds and wet rain of his mind, invisible to those
around him. In these moments he wears the weather with pride. Look how I stand
here, unbent by the sky’s torrents, by the seasons of my mind.
