Many things hailed as mentally healthy and beneficial make no sense to me. For example, the oft noted ‘bucket list’. Why do people make a list of activities to do in their retirement from a working life? Why can people not see the benefit, the actual mental health in retiring into a peaceful, quiet old age? Why do holidays need to be filled with exhaustive, sometimes expensive activities? It is not the activity that puzzles me. That makes perfect sense. It is the absence of quiet time; the ability to sit quietly in silence and listen to the sounds of one’s own soul. That puzzles me. We are a culture that seems to run incessantly from the cradle to the grave … and anyone who is not running is, to a greater or lesser extent, not mentally healthy.
It was not possible with my particular interest, to not notice so many rich and famous people who were apparently unable to retire peacefully; to simply enjoy the fruits of their labours. So many ordinary people after long, successful careers, not necessarily famous, but certainly successful, came at the close of their careers to a dry, empty, despairing sort of existence. It seems many retirees try hard to re-enter their field of fame. Too many go so far as to end their own lives. (Long years later I learned that would-be suicides needed to find, not a reason to live, but a reason to die. They needed to find something they cared about so deeply that they would die for that ‘something’ … and that was their reason to live. But that is another story told elsewhere, so back to this story).
When I look around the world at large, I see so many people unwilling to hear the silence; silence that is health and wholeness to the mind, the emotions, the body and the spirit.
When people hear this silence and do not know it for what it is, it seems they fear it. If they cannot destroy it with activity, they destroy it with drugs and/or alcohol. They destroy it with loud music or parties or any adrenalin rush that keeps the silence at bay; often going to doctors for medications or counselling; hiding in a variety of diagnoses, mistaking the silence for an illness. And sadly, mental health professionals do not recognise the silence for what it is. Do not know that in the silence is the voice of the Creator; the One who can hear and feel and heal our restlessness, our fear, our loneliness, our depression. So much in our world that is perceived to be mental illness of one sort or another, is merely fearful and deliberate deafness to the healing power that lives at the core – in the soul – of our being.
Hello! Wake up! Depression is part and parcel of ordinary human life on planet earth. There is nothing heroic in ‘battling depression’. It is ordinary; it is dignified human response; it is the choice to pick up one’s cross and carry it … and no one deserves a medal for doing that. It is ordinary living … welcome to the human race.
Peace continues to be absent in a world that thinks peace is merely the absence of conflict or the presence of justice. Peace as a state of being, irrespective of the outside world, waits to be rediscovered by this generation … or the next.