By Nature Humans Are Temporary Beings

One of the most valuable things I've learned in my life is that feelings are temporary. Or--perhaps more accurately--feelings are fluid, constantly changing from one state to another. And layered. Never simply one thing, but many different emotions piled on top of each other, sometimes in conflict with each other, sometimes deep, sustaining ones underneath sharper, more fleeting ones.

Saying this may not seem particularly original or insightful. I think it's something everyone experiences and instinctively knows on some level, whether they ever articulate it. The problem is that it's a slippery awareness. It's easy to forget. Especially during moments of strong, overwhelming emotions. The more powerful and lasting a feeling, the more it carries a sense that that is the only feeling you'll ever know. Love, by nature, feels forever. Sometimes sadness does too, along with many other emotions of depth and strength. Remembering in the midst of pure feelings that they won't always be that way is a challenge.

That awareness of the temporary nature of emotions comes with a certain poignancy when the feelings are happy ones. Even the best moments come tinged with sadness about the fact that they won't last forever. Love comes with anxiety that change and growth will most likely alter it--in ways that can be both good and bad. All of life's goodness can come to feel a bit too ephemeral and the good times dampened.

Still, there is a flip side. It's much harder to achieve. It is faith that darkness doesn't last, either. An inherent part of feelings such as hopelessness, despair, depression, malaise, and unhappiness is their overwhelming grip. They convince you that you are stuck. That there is no way out. And the most useful tool I've ever found for dealing with them is remembering that eventually, no matter what, those feelings will run their course and I will once again experience different emotions. Remembering that, which is a challenge in the moment, doesn't make the feelings themselves any less, it doesn't make them magically disappear, but it makes them more tolerable. It let's you say to yourself, "This sucks, but I just have to get through it and trust, even though I can't feel it, that there will eventually be something else besides this. There is a getting through it."

I can't always make myself believe it's true, but just reminding myself of the possibility makes it more bearable.

Or, as Janina Matthewson says in Of Things Gone Astray:

"No matter how old we get, we somehow can never convince ourselves that whatever trial we're in the middle of is only temporary. No matter how may trials we've had in the past, and no matter how well we remember that they eventually were there no longer, we're sure that this one, this one right now, is a permanent state of affairs. But it's not. By nature humans are temporary beings."

"You're saying I just have to ride it out until it goes away."

"Not at all, my dear. I'm saying you have to strive for a solution and trust that eventually there will be one."

It's a type of faith in your wisdom and experience.

Related:

The thing about feeling hopeless is that it's hard to recall secrets to happiness, even if you've had hundreds of them memorized for years like multiplication facts.

― Laura Resau, Tree of Dreams

And this, a little bit as well:

Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it. Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true.

― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

And this part of a post from a couple of years ago, Of Winter: A Dialogue, which was a conversation between myself and Katherine May's book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

I wrote above that most of the thoughts in this post are familiar, and many have even appeared in other shapes previously on this blog. A thought from May:

Life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable. . . . 

Some ideas are too big to take in once, and completely. For me, this is one of them. Believing in the unpredictability of my place on this earth--radically and deeply accepting it to be true--is something I can do only in fits and starts. It is in itself an exercise in mindfulness. I remind myself of its force, but the belief soon seeps away. I remind myself again. It drifts off with the tide. This does nothing to diminish the power of the next realisiation, and the next. I am willing to do it over and over again, throughout my life. I am willing to accept that it may never actually stick.

I've often looked at an artist's work and thought, they're painting the same thing over and over. Writers, too; sometimes it seems like a number of their books are the same story retold in a slightly different guise. I know I do the same with my posts on this blog. I keep sharing the same thoughts again and again. We all do it on social media. I think it's due at least in part to what May describes above. We're reminding ourselves, sometimes daily, of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that are slippery or, as she says, so big it's hard to fully grasp them all at once. So we keep revisiting them over and over. If they won't stick or keep sinking out of conscious awareness, then we just have to keep cycling them back to the top of our attention.

An old Facebook post:

It seems I say this every time, but tonight's sunset has to be the best one ever.

Religious worship is the same dynamic. We go back time after time, often on a regular basis, to refresh our spirits and to keep pushing those values to the top of our awareness. And many spiritual needs can be met by nature just as much from worship services.

I even wonder if this dynamic is a healthy aspect to confirmation bias. Yes, it's a bias that keeps us from being open to difference and otherness, but perhaps we don't always seek out the familiar to exclude so much as to keep confirming our identities. Perhaps.

By nature humans are temporary beings.

When I saw the Lunarbaboon for August 9, 2022, I thought to myself, "This is perfect. Life explained in a few words and pictures."

"Case"

"My body hurts and I'm always tired."

"I see. Based on your symptoms I'd say you have a case of being human."

"Oh no! Is that bad?"

"Don't worry! Being human kind of rules."

"It does?"

"Yeah! You can eat ice cream, pet puppies, go for walks, and make loves ones smile!"

"Wow!"

"The only downside is you will be in pain . . . a lot."

"Oh . . . how long does that last?"

"For you? Only about 32 more years."

"Sweet."

See the full comic at the link.

I also like this thought from Mark Manson: Happiness comes from progress. Therefore, happiness requires struggle.

He included the caption: "A happy life is not a life without struggle, it's a life with manageable struggle."

In fact, those two thoughts and this one all appeared in quick succession on my feed a couple of days ago and, in a flurry of activity, I reshared them all.

Good Bones

by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

My reflections on the three were the genesis of this post.

It just so happens our younger, age 7, likes watching home remodeling shows. One of his favorites is called Good Bones.

The other day, out of the blue, he initiated this exchange:

"We should sell our house."

"Oh, why is that?"

"This one's just not cutting it."

Very intelligent and articulate, he is also extremely kinetic and loves being physical. My wife just shared this exchange with him:

I let [Younger] explore my sewing box a bit. He found a piece of waistband elastic and I told him he could keep it.

"Mom, this would make a really great slingshot! I've never had a slingshot before," he said wistfully.

"I know, Honey, and there's a good reason for that."

His favorite part of any project is the demolition.

She also share this one about his older brother, age 8:

"[Older], what did you think of your new teacher last night [at back to school night]?"

"I liked her, but that was her trying to make a good first impression and not necessarily how she'll be with a whole classroom full of kids."

Thus sayeth the wise third grader. 

Also this week....  

"Mom, did you brush my hair?  It feels like you brushed my hair."

"Yes. An hour ago while you were watching TV. I asked you if I could brush your hair and you said yes. I sprayed it with detangler three times and brushed kind of roughly to see if you would notice that I brushed it. I'm pretty sure that question confirms that you did not."

See also his surprise at rain after we spent half an hour getting prepared for it before leaving the house in my last post, Really Good at Rolling in It.

And I like his reaction to seeing some graffiti in a pedestrian tunnel we recently traversed.

"There are creepy pictures on the walls," he said. "I feel like it's ancient writing; something's going to come out of the wall."

I love that he interpreted the latest stylized graffiti scrawls as ancient writing.

Though I am aware that indicates both the types of stories and media he's been exposed to and what he's been sheltered from. Despite many of our values, we're thoroughly suburban.

A few random text and picture pairings from InspiroBot.

Make someone you dislike feel weird. Stay powerful.

That's a perfect way to be powerful. Perfect.

Embrace the mundane not music

Do you read that as "Embrace the mundane, not music" or "Embrace the mundane not-music?" For me it is the latter, which is so much better. Music is good, but so is the mundane not-music.

Don't follow your delusions. Be led by your failures.

This is actually quite sage advise. Learn from your mistakes and resist your biases.

Finally, a couple of quotes I like from The School Between Winter and Fairyland by Heather Fawcett. This first one is simply lovely poetry:

Autumn wondered what it felt like to touch light. She often tried to imagine it. With its silvery hue, she thought moonlight would be cold and a little slippery, like fish. Starlight had the gentle creaminess of bone, and that's how it would feel--smooth and ghostly. Sunlight and firelight would be warm, of course, but firelight would crackle and snap in your hands, whereas golden sunlight would have the sticky ooze of honey.

And the second one ties back into the themes above.

Kind people were all well and good, but you simply had to respect a kind person with a hidden well of wickedness inside him.

That's because those people are the most authentic ones. Everyone has good and bad in them and everyone flows through different emotional states. We are all of it, though none of it forever. By nature humans are temporary beings.