Day 17 : May We Become Immense
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
—
Jane Goodall
Lately, I’ve been teetering on the edge of apathy, close to a black hole feeling of nihilism. The fear that nothing really matters, that everything is meaningless and pointless.
This is one of my biggest fears. It shows up when I’ve lost sight of what connects me to something bigger, deeper, more meaningful.
You could say there is a kind of freedom in not taking things so seriously, in remembering that the minor details don’t matter so much on their own, and that not everything in life needs to have a big point. But this feeling goes deeper than that.
It’s more painful and more frightening. It’s the aching feeling that I am nothing, that you are nothing, that the whole world is an empty shell, and that even the shell itself never existed and doesn’t matter. The darkness in this scares me and feels suffocating in its finality.
When I reach this place of darkness, I’ve learned that it’s usually a threshold. An opportunity to bravely step into the unknown and ask the question: What is the point?
I think this question arises when there’s a part of me that deeply needs an answer. But it’s not one that can be easily given. It asks us to have faith in the unknown, to move toward what cannot be proven, explained, or even seen.
It requires that we open our hearts to the vulnerability of choosing to believe in something, even when there is no proof, and no way of knowing where that belief will lead.
When these questions first come up, my habitual instinct is still to hide from them. To tell myself to get it together, stop being so sensitive, that it’s not a big deal.
But that only seems to amplify the feeling of aloneness and pointlessness. I have always found it hard to put effort toward things I don’t believe in. A big part of me needs to feel connected, to feel tethered to a reason for why I’m doing what I’m doing.
So when the fear of What’s the point? overwhelms my thoughts, weighing me down, I’ve realized I have two choices:
I can let it swallow me whole.
Or I can deliberately reach toward what I do know somewhere deep within.
Yesterday afternoon, I picked up Francis Weller’s newest book, In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty. I reached and found myself being guided toward what I’d been longing to remember.
In the introduction, Francis actually asks, “What if this matters?” as if speaking directly to me. A little wink from the universe? He goes on to say:
“This is a season of remembering the ancient rhythms of soul. It is time to become immense.
To become immense means to recall how embedded we are in the animate world—a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty….To become immense also includes the radical act of welcoming all of who we are into the story. Nothing excluded. We become large through accepting all aspects of our being—weakness and need, loneliness and sorrow, shame and fear—everything seen as essential to our wholeness, our immensity.
Fear can rattle us and activate strategic patterns of survival when the ground of the ordinary crumbles. These patterns enable us to endure in our lifetimes, but they cannot help us across this tremulous initiatory threshold we face as a wider community….We become immense, not in some grandiose, ‘I’ve got this’ kind of way, but in a way where we become flexible like a willow, taking it all into our open arms and offering shelter to all that is frightened and vulnerable.”
I could go on quoting the entirety of the book as it speaks so directly to what I’ve been feeling, but I’ll stop there and hope that you’ll read it yourself.
When the world feels hollow and pointless, cruel and empty, our work is to connect with and expand our inner light. To become bigger than the fear.
Not in an egotistical way, but in a way that allows us to hold the light within the long dark. To be strong enough to stay in it, to stay with it, and with one another.
In every moment, we exist at choice: to shrink in the face of fear and pain and the seeming pointlessness of it all, or to become immense.
Last night, I wrote my own principles for a creative and expansive life, and an artist’s prayer.
I intend to read these daily to help calibrate my inner compass toward the beliefs I want to expand within me. To remind myself of what I know to be true deep down. And to help me course-correct on the days when I find myself at the edge of the abyss of apathy and nihilism.
If you’re feeling any of this too, may we both know that we are not alone.
