Dear Cary,
I am a 25-year-old young woman who is literally on the verge of losing herself. I went to college just to please my parents. I am such a free-spirited person and highly optimistic but truth be told that is just a mask. I have lost the essence of who I am, what am I doing here, why do people like me. Why can't I make my feet move and get a life? I need help. I don't like feeling as if any second now I can buy a ticket to an unknown place and leave all those who love and care for me.
Or maybe I need that? I don't know, but I am here to get some sort of guidance.
Yours truly,
Lost
Dear Lost,
You sound like you are experiencing the groundlessness of existence. This is a feeling of weightlessness, lack of connection, a floating feeling, a sort of out-of-body thing, no? One simple, temporary cure for this is to simply do some physical work that connects you with your surroundings. Gardening is one good choice; or you might do some carpentry or landscape work, or even just cleaning your house will help.
As the Buddhist Peme Chodron says, we live with this condition of groundlessness. But there are ways to connect. Physical work in the world is one way. It connects us to the world. We also need to be connected to ourselves, through meditation, which takes us back into our bodies by connecting us to our own breath. If you do not know how to do meditation, just look it up or ask someone for a simple breath meditation. There are lots of ways to do it but the essential thing seems to be that sustained attention on our own breath focuses a spirit that has been wandering and unmoored.
It is a matter of connecting your consciousness to its sources. Its sources are in the body and also in the world. At a certain point, we realize that they are the same thing, the body and the world, but for now it is useful to make these distinctions so that we know what tasks to undertake. Work in the natural world and meditate. That will bring you temporarily out of this floating, fragmented, groundless state and into something more manageable. You will not leave this state permanently, because it is in fact a state of reality. Let's say, perhaps, it will just make the symptoms of temporal existence more manageable.
Once you do this you can begin to design the life that you will lead. You feel restless. This may mean it is time to wander. Wandering is not the same as feeling restless and not grounded. You can wander the world and yet be present and grounded. Wandering may be what you are called to do now.
The key to wandering with integrity is to welcome what is strange and new. You ever see American tourists in Europe, sampling things, controlling things, buying things, anxious and blind to what is around them, acting as if Europe were nothing but another mall? You know that feeling of special disgust you get, as if you were watching a sacrilege, as if they were destroying works of art by passing over them as if they had been set out merely as amusing distractions for bored tour groups? This is the quality of inattention we Americans are prone to in our spoiled, luxurious lives of ignorance and greed. This is the price we pay for all our free stuff: It robs us of consciousness.
To prepare for wandering you may have to give up some of your luxuries. This will remind you that along with most Americans you have been living a life of unsustainable luxury for too long. Along with working outdoors and meditating, relinquish some of your luxuries. Experience loss and sacrifice.
There is a passage of life in which we lose what we have and thereby see what is valuable. Someone asked me last night in my live Webcast what I thought of Lent, and though I was not raised with any religion and am regrettably ignorant of Catholic ritual, the idea of giving up something is, to me, a way of opening a window, or a space in which we can see the value of things. So give up some things. Give up your luxuries. Give up your house and your sweet Starbucks drinks; pare down your possessions; simplify your life. See if that doesn't help you to see what is valuable and eternal. And then go on a journey. Wander.
Another thing you may be feeling is the unreality of our political moment. You went to school and learned something about the gathering of evidence, the testing of hypotheses and the construction of modest conclusions about the world around us. You may have learned something about rhetoric and debate. But you were not prepared for the surreal propaganda that passes for political speech today. This affects you psychologically. You do not live in a vacuum. You are also responding to concrete manifestations of human irrationality on a global scale.
One leaves the relatively orderly system of college life prepared to confront a world of orderly choices and one instead confronts an absurdity.We are living in the immediate aftermath of an economic crash. This crash was many things -- criminal, negligent, class-based, structural, technological, political. Among all these things, it was also a result of a collective will to irrationality. We are now in a fragile, liminal stage of recovery both economic and psychological.
Therefore, your task is twofold: to progress spiritually, and also to understand the way the world is acting upon you to make you feel uncertain.
I have given you plenty to do. Doing all these things may help you feel a little more grounded, less afraid, less scattered and confused. That will be a good thing, because the world needs more people who are grounded and ready to live lives of integrity. The integrity that comes of your work on yourself will radiate out into the world.
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