A Guide for the Hopeless When "Life Sucks"

Let’s be honest, who said it better, me or Emily? Hope is the thing with feathers or hope is so exhausting? Read on… unless you’re offended by “life sucks.” Then stop here.

Hope is always presented to us as this great virtue, isn’t it? When life utterly sucks, we’re supposed to turn to hope to pull us through. Hope is the good guy. Hope is the salvation. The thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

But sometimes hope is just exhausting. We don’t have in it us… there is not a shred of energy for a shred of hope. The notion that we even should have hope wears us down further… what then?

Well, here’s the thing about hope. It has its place for sure, but it can also carry a subtle tug of resistance. It can give us the message that we shouldn’t be where we are and the present moment needs to be different than it is.

The screensaver on my computer — which pops up when my computer has been idle for a few minutes — says, THIS MOMENT IS ENOUGH. (Go ahead and steal it, I don’t mind. :)

I put it there to remind me that I don’t need to change whatever is happening in any given moment. This moment is enough unto itself. Or another way of saying it is, I am enough in this moment. Even in this God awful, life sucks kind of moment… who I am and how I am showing up… is enough.

We all know life can really suck… like a lot of the time. And that comes straight from the mouth of a dedicated gratitude buddy! But we’ve all been there, some of us more often and more intensively than others. Hope tries to tell us that life’s suckiness is not enough, which is logical from a certain vantage.

Meditation offers a different interpretation. In meditation, we seek to ease into the suckiness of it all. And here’s how that looks for me, in stages:

Stage 1: Sit down, close eyes, breathe. Images and thoughts about how effing sucky life is pop into my mind. Recent conversations, memories, flashbacks… it’s a lot! It’s a reminder that life sucks!

Now lots of people will give up on meditation at this point… because it feels triggering. If they do make it, many will likely give up at the next stage…

Stage 2: The buzz of thought energy starts to settle a bit and is followed by a flood of feelings… and not very nice ones…If I haven’t cried yet, now I do. Why? Because life sucks and this is all very hard!

But I stay… I don’t run… and I manage to make it to stage 3

In stage 3, who I am in this life-sucks kind of moment becomes enough. My despair is enough, my resignation is enough, my hopelessness is enough, my exhaustion is enough. And slowly, I start to melt into all of this… or some would say, i surrender to it. Me and life sucks begin to merge until at some point it feels not exactly like we are a still pool, but a still puddle, because let’s face it, it’s been raining pretty hard.

Sooner or later, a voice likely pops into my head that says, ok, I became a still puddle…NOW can this suckiness start to change???

But then it’s time to rinse and repeat. My desire for life to be different… is enough. At some point, without me doing much of anything at all, a flicker of hope will rise up out of the still puddle. Almost like a thing with feathers… ready to perch in the soul.

And I carry on.

The Message Behind Jerry Seinfeld's Head

Blurry Kramer and blurry Jerry or something more?

Not long ago, lots of people were talking about a golden age in TV... by the way, let me digress here for a moment and say that if you have any movies or series that you recommend, with both good storytelling and a (somewhat) enlightened message, would you please email me your recommendations? I will crowdsource them and share what comes back in my newsletter...

Ok, where were we... the golden age of TV. Somehow amidst a golden age of TV, I still ended up spending the last year rewatching Seinfeld. Suffice to say, I don't watch much TV. But for me, Seinfeld is all about the nostalgia, the neurosis, the NYC, the absurdity. All of it.

Recently, I came across Season 9; Episode 17: the Bookstore. There is nothing particularly enlightened about this episode or any other episode of Seinfeld, except this one thing... the purple book behind Kramer's head. As I was watching this episode, with multiple takes in this same spot, I could make out that the title has "Love" in it and at some point, I just wanted to know what the heck that book was....!

So I watched, paused, squinted, zoomed in, rewatched, paused, squinted, zoomed in again until I finally figured out that it's a book called Teachings on Love, by none other than Thich Naht Hahn. Huh. It felt right up my alley. Yeah why not, I'll read it, which I still intend to do... but the story here is about something else.

The story is about how Season 9; Episode 17 came out in 1998. How in 1998, I had just graduated from college. I was about ten years away from a major depressive collapse. The light of divine love seemed all but non-existent in my world. I was searching, but love was hiding... hiding in plain sight, right behind Kramer's head. Love was there. but I was pretty busy watching Jerry and Kramer's antics. Love was there but I couldn't see it.

The ethos of Seinfeld is sort of the antithesis of spirituality, so it makes me wonder about this placement... accidental, intentional...? You'd have to look really damn hard to catch the book’s title, which hardly smells of overt product placement.

Season 9; Episode 17 came out before 9/11, which catapulted a major global reckoning, and it came out long before our most recent global reckonings. Sometimes the world seems literally besieged by turmoil, but this episode reminds of a truth I now know: love is here, even amidst absurdity. If you can't find it, look closer, it's hiding in plain sight.

Wherever we are these days, whatever is going wrong or right in our lives, I hope we remember that.