In these four walls

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

The dark night for me is winter. The weather draws in, the temperature falls, I self isolate and my energy dwindles until I sink into a listing state of apathy, fatigue, and sadness at the reminder that by every winter’s end that mannequin in the mirror has become less honest, less generous, less thoughtful, just… less.

We’re two weeks into spring now, but the spirit that has slowly been brought low may only now, and almost equally slowly, begin to recover. The last few days have been rain again, but when the sun shines I feel myself coming back to life, bit by bit.

In her essay The Language of Literature (Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction, 2020), Arundhati Roy describes using the characters of her novels to escape “the tyranny of hard borders” and immediately I felt that these four walls are that hard border for me. Not the walls of this apartment, but the four walls of my mind. What then, is my equivalent means of escape? Where do I shelter from the tyranny of my mind? The irony is I seek shelter within these four walls from which I am trying to escape — a regressive feedback loop, a death spiral.

There’s something haphazard about both my descent to, and ascent from these lows. Or perhaps not haphazard, but helpless. The maxim of tyranny is “divide and rule” and I am both tyrant and subject. I can’t shake the instinct that I have to do it alone — as my mother does, as my father does — despite knowing that it is no good.

Martha Beck (The Way of Integrity, 2021) gets at that instinct I have, when things are not working, to simply do the same but harder, and how that instinct will always fail me.

“If whatever you’re doing isn’t working, don’t do it harder.”
This applies in every area of life, but most of us don’t seem to realize it. Our cultural assumption is that doing things harder is the way out of confusion and into happiness. With a bit more elbow grease and a solid grip on our own bootstraps, we should be able to yank ourselves straight out of suffering and into a fabulous life.

The only remedy I know is the long walk.

But am I ready to go back to the walk?
In barely more than two weeks I’ll be back at the head of this walk that I have bound myself to, and the transition feels almost masochistic this time.

Last year the walking season began from Pëllumbas, that home from home, having spent the month in happy company with Atlas, Darcy, Bara, Matt, Ilir, Diego, Eliana, Harry, Ellie, Kaur, Helen & Irfaan, and a steady stream of guests. That transition back to the walk — from working on the mud houses, bumpy bus rides into Tirana, walking and re-walking the canyon, playing cards nearly every night — felt natural, easy. And the season came to an end with equal delight. I hadn’t intended to end the year in Istanbul, but serendipity knew. Meeting Kyle and Avvai en-route, those weeks in that megalopolis with them, the offer to join them in Canada for the winter. Through the tint of nostalgia at least, last year felt like an unending crescendo. Every step (including the miss-steps) seemed to carry that crescendo higher.

So perhaps it’s only right that going back feels hard. If I feel uncomfortable at the end of this chapter it is out of a fear of letting go, of having wanted that wave to last forever. But if it had gone on I would have only taken it for granted, and dysphoria, discomfort, and doubt return because they still have much to teach me. The torment is knowing that it is the trying to hold on that accelerates the end.

So yes, I am ready to walk again.