It has been a pretty miserable week, all told. Losing one of my favorite little furry people in the world was very hard to take.
I am not over it and I honestly don’t know that I will.
When I open my heart to someone, I tend to leave it open, long after they are gone.
So, I sat here this morning, in a sulk. Not really ready for my week. And I remembered these few pictures from Lake Parker earlier in the month, that hadn’t seen the light of day.
So, I figured now was as good a time as any.
Losing myself in the images for a few moments, I was able to remember a better moment and even if just for a moment, I felt better.
It had been a chilly start to a spring morning down at the lake and it was interrupted too quickly by arriving boaters for me to consider it a real shoot.
But, interestingly, two of my favorite shots of the collection involved a trailer engaged in shedding its boat into the water. The first of these (pic 3) had the tail lights of the trailer lighting up the near side of dock with a lovely red tone. While the second one looked like a UFO was moving under the waters beneath me (pic 4).
They are here at the end of this blog. Enjoy!
Meanwhile back in my present mode, I have noticed that each time I have shared my sad story with friends or family, there has been a rush to console and reassure me that things will get better.
I think we all do that. So, I am as guilty as anyone.
But the truth is that things oftentimes don’t get better and we have to learn how to cope with that.
If we stand around waiting for them to improve and they don’t, then we add frustration and a sense of disappointment to our hurt and sadness.
Humans developed this “and they lived happily ever after” ending hundreds of years ago. It became a standard phrase to cap off children stories.
Yet, we try to attach the same ending to adult lives, when we know it isn’t true. I don’t know why we do that.
Is it merely because we don’t have something useful to say, so we insert stock phrases like “time will heal” or “it will all work out in the end” or “hang in there, there are good times ahead”.
Phrases of promise can sound wonderful in the moment they are being said but they offer little real remedy. And as time plays out, they inevitably ring out empty, when time fails to heal, it doesn’t actually work out, and the bad times continue.
In reality, these platitudes are little more than a segue, as the speaker looks to escape from the condolence into another topic.
There is another phrase (the one I have used as the heading for this blog) that is truly a better thought in how best to handle these situations.
When we are miserable, there is often a real value in just having someone experience a misery with us. It can reinforce our feelings of sadness and upset and we realize that we are not experiencing this emotion on our own.
Better yet, if their source of misery is different from our own. We get exposed to other miseries and are aware that we are not the only one hurting in the world right now.
In the company of others experiencing misery, we can often find that our own source of misery is even less than theirs and in turn we start to feed on their misery and feel a little better from it.
While the platitudes above try to create a hope within us, a mere condolence does not. It only expresses a pity which in itself can be a soothing lotion on our wounded soul.
It is an interesting coincidence then that the phrase “misery loves company” originated from the 1592 play of Dr. Faustus, where the main character sells his soul to the Devil in return for having all his desires met for a 24 year period.
At the very end of the play, when the devils drag him away to pay his price, the man who had everything now begs for just one more thing … pity.
Spoiler Alert (in case you didn’t know) … he doesn’t get it.
I find it interesting how over the years, human pride has refashioned the word “pity” into something demeaning and therefore something we should avoid.
Yet, pity is actually the experience and expression of sympathy for someone who is going through a bad experience.
It is a totally natural human emotion and in fact is one of the dividing principles that separate some of us from the sociopaths and psychopaths in the world. People who are unable to feel pity.
So, an expression of pity and a recognition of misery is both real and enough. No need to enhance it with meaningless platitudes. We all understand the “hope” angle. But hope is a hollow vessel to those in pain, bringing a promise of change that frankly, almost never happens.
… just a thought.
