previously published • 24 June 2025
Hopelessness and Spring colds
Originally published April 15, 2025
So, as is common with many people in the early Spring, I’m kinda sick. Not like all-out, stay-in-bed, can’t-move sick, but annoyingly-disrupting-my-life sick. I gave in and slept a lot over the weekend, thinking that would kick it out, but here it is Tuesday and I still woke up with a bit of a sore throat and general malaise. I pretty much ignored it yesterday and managed to get some work done and had a reasonably “normal” day, helped by the sunshine and 70-degree temperature! But today the sun is hiding and it’s not as warm, which is definitely helping to create the atmosphere that I do not want to leave the house (luckily I can work from home).
I’ve been slowly working my way through Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart,* and this morning, as I’m struggling with this physical and aesthetic feeling, the chapter I’m on is about “Hopelessness and Death.”
She writes about the hope “that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be,” that it comes from the “feeling that we lack something” and that this “robs us of the present moment.”
By using various ways of trying to escape whatever we’re feeling in the present moment, we rob ourselves of the practice of being. For me, instead of trying to pretend that my body isn’t doing what it’s doing, I can instead feel the congestion in my nose, the gunk in my throat that is making it sore. I can acknowledge that my brain is still working, evidenced by me reading and thinking and writing. I recognize that although a part of me wants to be “out in the world,” doing whatever else I would otherwise be doing this morning—which would amount to me trying to hustle a “new” version of me into existence—instead I’ll sit with this frustratingly fragile human version of me here and now. I’ll try to “relax with groundlessness of [my] situation.”
Chodron calls this “death in everyday life”: “experiencing all the things we don’t want.” By acknowledging that “life is like getting into a boat that’s just about sail out to sea and sink,” and not avoiding the notion that we will all shuffle off this mortal coil, we can make friends with ourselves, “have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship.” By not running away from the fact that this moment is all that we really have, by noticing how and where we really are RIGHT NOW and not distracting ourselves with what we “should” be doing or going or becoming, maybe we can actually suffer less.
That’s the irony, I suppose. By being “groundless” we can actually feel more grounded. By noticing that we have nowhere to actually go, we can appreciate where we are. By being here, we can enjoy the journey more. By being still, we may find where we are supposed to be.
This reminds me of an explanation I saw recently from Neil deGrasse Tyson about how the tides actually work, not just what they look like from our perspective here on Earth. He said that what’s really happening when we observe the tide going in and out, the waves breaking on the shore, is that the water is actually still and it is us (on the surface of the Earth) that is actually moving—the Earth’s rotation actually moves us THROUGH the waves. The gravitational pull of the moon on the water is fairly constant; it is the turn of the Earth that makes it appear as thought the water is moving.
It seems to me, in a somewhat similar fashion, that if we can be still, we can perhaps let the world move around (or underneath?) us. Perhaps when we can recognize the chaos, the suffering that IS life, we can essentially minimize (the effects of) that chaos and suffering on our selves and our lives. By keeping the gravitational pull of that recognition steady(-ish), maybe we can let the world turn underneath us.
For me today, that means letting myself rest, not leaving the house, drinking a lot of tea, and trying to do the things I need to still get done today, but without stressing about all the other things I always feel like I “should” be doing (which, frankly, is always an impossibly long list anyway).
*I do not make any money from this link. This is purely for your ease in case you are interested in learning more about the book. This link is on bookshop.org, where you can purchase books from independently owned bookstores. Better yet, get it from your local library!