OUR DARKEST HOURS

We have had lots of them.  

Darkest Hours I mean.

And I’m not just talking about the ones that we have all lived through and man, we’ve lived through plenty. In order of what I think of first,  I have experienced The Kennedy Brothers and Martin Luther King Assassinations, The Challenger Explosion,  9/11,  Princess Diana, The Vietnam War, The Cold War confrontations, the day that Carol Schwartz broke up with me.  

That last one is a day that will go down in infamy.

Thanks to TV, radio and film we have “lived” through tons of other darkest hours: The Hindenburg,  World Wars One and Two, The Holocaust, The Kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby, The Titanic, The Civil War, The Revolutionary War, Civil Rights.  Tragedy is in fact a film genre wedged right in there, in between comedy and drama.  Shakespeare sure as hell knew how to wield a tragic pen. 

We all have our, own personal darkest hours like when cancer and/or death comes to pay a visit to kidnap our parents, siblings, relatives, our new born, friends or even you.

In one, brief, snapshot period of time I lost my best friend, my mother and my therapist.  All that was left for me to talk to were the walls which were fast closing in on me.  Then I lost three years of my life to mental illness.   I toyed with suicidal ideation like it was Chaplin’s globe in The Great Dictator until my then life as I knew it met the very same fate as that inflatable earth.

How is it that I’m still alive?  It’s because before my therapist, Mike, died, (imagine a Keebler Elf with an eye twinkle and a white beard) said two things that would eventually resonate in the echo chamber of my heart:

Depression is a crisis of faith. When you reach the lowest ebb of darkness, you find yourself not believing or feeling anything.  It’s like all your nerve endings suddenly individually implode like exploding stars, the very ones that you always secretly wished upon and even worse, the docent voice of personal experience and wisdom, that is usually in charge of navigating you through the memory galleries of you grows mute and helpless which in turn short circuits the lighthouse in your head, which suddenly switches the high beam off and that built-in guidance system which you have depended on to sweep the rough seas and predict the violent storms, suddenly goes radio silent and all that is left in your ears is static which is the elegiac symphony of abandonment.

Before he died, Mike said to me, “You have to metaphorically die.  Once you do the clouds will part and your depression will lift.”  When he said that to me I was basically, well, picture the Mouseketeers of the fifties.  Now wipe their names off their tee shirts and turn their incessant chipper grins upside down and you will get a pretty good picture...or negative of the club that I was a member of.  

Even with an extra set of ears I heard nothing.   Eventually, I did figure it out, when I was sitting in the middle of a torn asunder garden in the middle of hurricane whacked Key West Florida.  It was raining, which is the perfect soundtrack for a depressive and while sitting in the piss drizzle, I noticed that the garden was coming back.  It was not the same garden as before.   It had metaphorically died and was in fact being reborn.  And in that stunning moment of enlightenment and pure revelation the clouds both figuratively and literally parted.   The depression flew off me like an ashes slathered phoenix and from that point, I never missed a flight to my next dream.

Now other than sharing my most personal stories with you, what is the point?  

The point is we are ALL reborn ALL the time.  

Personally,  not withstanding any sudden mind-blowing, out of nowhere life obstacle that may land on you like a Looney Tune/Roadrunner anvil, I think the average life span for most of us is five years.

It that was a Broadway show, that would be one hell of a run.  Eight shows a week.  Packed rapt audiences.  A standing ovation every night.  Sounds like a great childhood to me.

But almost to the Cinderella minute, everything seems turns to shit and pumpkins.  Things just suddenly spiral out of control and go spectacularly wrong.  Some of the evil has been conspiratorially  engineered by your deep subconscious. Other is God getting back at you for whatever thoughtless, vindictive or selfish thing that you did when no one was looking but you.

The point is, life as you know it is a deft magic trick which can instantly meet the same fate as The Challenger until all that is left is your crippled skeleton  and all the suddenly exposed, misfiring, unplugged nerve wires of your heart.

That’s when we go running to self-help books or the all knowing, all seeing Oprah to benevolently provide us with THE answer on how we are supposed to be able to live to see another day.

Some may turn to meds.  Others psychotherapy.  Or both.   The point is, you’re that back to being that Mouseketeer with the nameless tee shirt again, left to wander the scorched earth of your life in order to figure out if you are alone in this post-apocalylpso dance. That pun actually refers  to Calypso of Greek mythology fame who detained Odysseus for seven years which is what an average day feels like when you are psychologically and emotionally dead.

The thing is while the town of Phoenix may never rise from the ashes (they really should add a splash of COLOR to their houses), both the bird and us will.  Eventually. Assuredly.   

It just takes time and round the clock, live-in catastrophic care.

I have this thing that happens to me ALL the time.  

No matter where I am or what I am doing, I will glance at the clock and it will be the numbers of my birthday.  Plus those three numbers pop up all around me over and over and over again.

It took me years of slow growth maturity to figure that this was the universe’s way of instructing me; reminding me that we are all going to be reborn again and again and again.

Our in-between lives are just endless bouts of labor.   

During those Kegel challenging time, we have to keep bearing down, do our cleansing Lamaze breaths as we slowly push out our now stillborn life.  Once it’s finally out of us, we have to properly mourn it, hold it, kiss it goodbye and then move on because we have no choice: the next train bound for glory is now boarding.

Until it derails.   Just like the greatest loves of your life which almost always seem to shorten your five year plan the minute that your heart begins to crack like global warming ice.

So especially on those days when you just can’t take another second of Trump and believe to your core that everything that is holy and meaningful to you has been destroyed by the fascist Kristallnacht of his Presidency, when you feel in your heart that there is no more fairness or human decency left, that truth has been immolated in effigy and the meek and the moron have inherited the earth, just remember this:

My mom and George Harrison was right: All things will pass.

Drift back on your memory rowboats back to your darkest hours and remember the Bleak House that you once lived in.  Remember the throat throttling suffocation.  The unbearable sting of loneliness.  The endless taunting mind tour of second guessing.  The punishment that you inflicted upon yourself by daring to be open and vulnerable. The feeling that you just cannot go on.  

And oar your way to the chapters that came after.

Remember how you were, time and time again, air lifted to safety by the love and support of friends, relatives and maybe even the universe.

Everything in life is circular.  

The planets, the oceans, the ballerina’s pirouette, our very existence: all one big circle.

To assume that you’ve made it and happiness is a permanent condition is a fool’s errand.  

Only a fool balances on and believes in the tightrope of a net free straight line.

Trump will eventually be gone, but sadly, we will be tested by someone else just like him.

It’s will be up to us to remember and honor the  blood, sweat and tears that it took to survive.