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1/ McKee: You’ve said that anesthesia and amnesia are the two primary “sins” of modern society.
Weller: We go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not been granted what we need to thrive. The levels of addiction in our society are off the charts https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow
Weller: We go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not been granted what we need to thrive. The levels of addiction in our society are off the charts https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow
2/ and I’m not just talking about alcohol and drugs; I’m talking about shopping, working, sex. Addictions are an attempt to cope with intolerable states. The meager lives we are asked to live, in which we are often reduced to “earning a living,” are themselves intolerable.
3/ We are meant to have a more sensuous, imaginative, and creative existence. As children we are enchanted with the world, yet as adults we end up, as poet Mary Oliver said, “breathing just a little, and calling it a life.” That’s the anesthesia.
4/ McKee: And the amnesia?
Weller: We are living in what writer and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls the Great Forgetting. Many of us have forgotten that we’re a part of an ecosystem, a watershed. We’ve forgotten that we’re kin to all the other animals.
Weller: We are living in what writer and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls the Great Forgetting. Many of us have forgotten that we’re a part of an ecosystem, a watershed. We’ve forgotten that we’re kin to all the other animals.
5/ We’ve forgotten that we need each other. We have forgotten what I call the “commons of the soul.”
For thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss
For thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss
6/ and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning. I call these activities “primary satisfactions.”
We are hard-wired to want them, but few of us receive them. In their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions:
We are hard-wired to want them, but few of us receive them. In their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions:
7/ rank, privilege, wealth, status — or, on the shadow side, addictions. The problem with these secondary satisfactions is that we can never get enough of them. We always want more. But once we find our primary satisfactions, we don’t want much else.
8/ Though primary satisfactions are rare in our culture, we do experience them. We can remember what that felt like and let our longing for that state become our compass, telling us what direction we need to go to get back to those satisfactions.
9/ We can find them through our friendships, by spending time in nature, by risking being vulnerable with someone we trust.
10/ When I was in Malidoma’s village, every night at dusk the commons would swell with people, and they would laugh and share stories and millet beer and food, and the kids would play and then lie down on the ground and fall asleep,
11/ and the young children who were nursing could go to any mother for milk. Here we have “happy hour,” when we can go to the bar and have half-priced drinks; there they have an actual happy hour.
12/ When modern people engage in grief rituals, they often say it feels familiar, as if they’ve done this before. Yes, we have, for more than two hundred thousand years. And then, within the past few hundred years, it practically disappeared. That’s a profound loss.
13/ The psychiatrist R.D. Laing said we arrive here as Stone Age children. In other words, we inherit at birth the entire lineage of our species. And yet now it’s “normal” to cry alone in our room — or not to cry at all.
14/ Inevitably we will be alone much of the time with our grief, and that solitude can be rich, as long as we know we are held somewhere, somehow, by others. Our friendships and our community enable us to go into that dark space alone.
15/ Weller: If we have both an adequate level of companionship in our sorrow and periods of solitude that aren’t about distraction or avoidance, then grief will transform itself into tender melancholy. This life we have is incredibly short, but we’ve been blessed with it.
16/ When we shut off our grief, we forget that. To let grief work its alchemy on you yields gravitas, by which I mean the ability to be present with the bittersweet reality of life, which always includes loss.
17/ There’s no way to be spared sorrow. I wouldn’t even wish that upon someone. But we shouldn’t get stuck in our grief; it’s not a permanent address but a companion that walks beside us. Everything I love, I will lose. That’s the harsh truth.
18/ You either have to shut down your heart — and miss the love that is around you — or wrestle with that truth and come out the other end. There is indeed such a thing as joyful sorrow.
19/ The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair.
20/ If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.
21/ And we must have compassion for ourselves, too. When I lead workshops on self-compassion, I begin by saying, “This is a weekend in non-self-improvement.” [Laughter.] We’re so driven to make ourselves “better” all the time
22/ as if the better we became, the more people would like us. We are mercilessly hard on ourselves for our losses, our defeats, our wounds, our failures, the parts of us that don’t measure up.
23/ McKee: The physician Gabor Maté believes that the suppression of sorrowful emotions in childhood greatly increases the risks of addiction, cancer, heart disease, and suicide later in life. Weller: The #1 cause of death in this country is heart disease.
24/ Physically that has to do with our diets and lifestyles, but I also see it metaphorically: our hearts are hurting because we do not metabolize our grief. Instead we avoid it, neglect it, push it into a corner. A heart that does not somehow deal with grief turns hard and…
25/ becomes unresponsive to the joys and sorrows of the world. Then our communities become cold; our children go unprotected; our environment can be pillaged. Only if we learn to grieve can we keep our hearts responsive & do the difficult work of restoring & repairing the world.
