MIND MOVES:Learning to be still can calm a troubled mind, writes TIM SMYTH
THERE’S AN old saying about how it’s better to think of your worst enemies as your best teachers. It’s a line that I come back to when I think about how I’ve learned to deal with my experience of depression. (It’s also one I think of whenever I hear the “r” word.)
I came off medication a few months ago, and it’s like my feet are back on the ground. My steps might be shaky or cautious, but reminding myself that I’m in charge of where I’m going helps a lot. The things that worry me haven’t changed. I don’t think they ever will and I don’t think they do for anybody, but my attitude towards them and the way I deal with them have changed very much.
Depression can make you want to hide under the duvet, but the most valuable lesson it can teach you is that changing your life can mean doing the same things you did before – only more carefully.
That’s not the same as repeating the mistakes of the past: it’s actually a step beyond the idea of there being mistakes and towards the view that what matters is the attitude we bring to the things of life, rather than the things themselves. Because when you change the way you see the world, you change your world.
A lot of people helped me through my troubles – family, friends, colleagues. They didn’t have to do anything special; for them to be themselves was enough. What worked was my introduction to the practice of mindfulness at a course run by the Sanctuary last September. It’s impossible to summarise the journey in a few hundred words, but what I can say is that mindfulness is a gift for which I am hugely grateful.
Mindfulness begins by slowing down your attention, with the aim of fully grasping, fully noticing the present moment – wherever you find yourself, whatever you might be feeling. It’s not magic. Nothing really happens. The world doesn’t change. I don’t change, not in a substantial way, but my grasp on things becomes surer, my perception clearer. It turns troubles into a challenge rather than a threat.
Being in the world is no longer a question of retreat or confrontation. As David Foster Wallace, a favourite writer of mine, once said, “It’s all about immersion.”
Whether it is one day of difficulty or a period of depression or even just a few minutes where it all feels like it’s about to fall apart, you can change everything about it in a single moment. You can transform the causes of despair into a starting-point for hope in the time it takes for a few, slow breaths. All it takes to change your situation is to see it clearly; to look through the plethora of obligations and deadlines and see the still, calm core where all of this is happening. You just have to say, “I’m in here somewhere”, and you’ll find that place, because that place is the part of you that notices, that keeps track, that monitors. You can call it your attention, or your mind, or whatever. But once you see clearly enough to locate it, there’s nothing you can’t do.
I probably ought to be getting my quotable wisdom from more reputable sources than the wall of my local pub, but at Doyle’s on D’Olier Street there’s a sign that says: “A good time is coming, be it ever so far away.”
You don’t know when it’s coming, just that the longer you stick around and stay hopeful, the more quickly it’ll seem to arrive.
Hope isn’t the same thing as optimism. I’m paraphrasing the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz here, but I like to think of hope less as the belief that things will work out for the best, and more as the conviction that they must. When you put it that way, hope becomes an act of will, a change in your way of seeing. It becomes a realisation that credits you with the strength and inventiveness to alter your situation, even while acknowledging your limitations.
From that comes the kind of clear-sightedness that encourages you to keep trying, and to see failure as nothing more than the possibility of trying again. That is as true of surmounting an economic depression as it is of living with a personal one.
Tim Smyth is youth advisor to Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie). Tony Bates is on leave.