Increasingly I find myself in a dark hole. The light is far above me, a pinpoint, and the walls crumble as I try and claw my way up. There don’t seem to be any footholds. It just seems so deep, and the light so very far away.
There are a number of reasons, even things I can say with certainty serve as the triggers that open up the ground before me and send me plummeting into this hole. Some of these triggers are far beyond my pay grade, the stuff of legendary self-help mantras that urge me to accept with serenity the things I cannot control (which I always have an issue with as if it is something so egregious we have an obligation to try, even if it’s impossible, to stand up against. Tyranny, oppression, hate, geopolitical cards against humanity played by others). Some of the triggers are assuredly within my control. But even knowing rationally why I’m in this dark hole I can’t always seem to get myself out of it.
This morning I begged off taking Steve to the airport and made him take an Uber.
I also cancelled on dinner plans with two of the greatest people on earth because I’m just not good company… and because this jetlag thing has me crashing by 6:30 PM and thus on top of being a lousy dinner companion, I’d also be a NARCOLPETIC dinner company.
“And why am I in such a cruddy mood, I’ll tells ya…..zzzzz…..zzzzz…. and ANOTHER thing–zzzz….zzzz..zzzzzzzzzz…”
I ate stupid things, things that were just around, trying to find solace in empty calories for a feeling of emptiness that I knew would only lead me down a darker rabbit hole of despair.
I drifted in and out of restless sleep, whether from accumulated jetlag depletion or ongoing senses of fatalistic depression hardly matters. The result was the same — hours passed without a feeling of rest or rejuvenation.
I finally decided that despite the aches and pains of travel, time, and tension, I needed to try and do something. Anything. The key to working one’s way out of that dark hole is to take one small move, then another, and build up the moves of progress into a substantial climb. One has to try and string together moments of happiness or at least not-unhappiness to get that handhold on rising up.
I opted to try for a run, something I had been meaning to do since 3 AM this morning and finally got up the nerve to do at 2 PM.
It was not going well. I was sluggish and angry and sad and despondent and all kinds of negative adjectives.
And then, unexpectedly, I came across this scene:
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how we all come at communication, interpretation, art, life the whole shebang with individual personal baggage. We interact with our world through a lens built up via experiences and moments that at times may have been shared with others but always have a uniquely personal impact on who we are as individuals. And so as a reductive not-really-apropos analogy, while I may look at something and see a goblet, others may look and see two people speaking:
So anyway, when I came across the above sidewalk closure, I just started laughing. I’m sure the construction guys and the other pedestrians thought I was nuts, some crazed denizen of Hollywood Boulevard. And maybe I was detached from reality, existing in my own world.
But the moment reminded me of one of my favorite bits from the Ghostbusters movies. It’s a seminal comedic moment for me, one I think I’ve probably referenced previously in some other blog post. But it’s a moment in Ghostbusters II, or until 2016’s Paul Feig misfire, the one many folks viewed as the bastard stepchild of the Ghostbusters franchise. It’s a throwaway line from Egon Spengler and it has so many layers of characters, situations, and history rolled into it that it cracks me up any time I think of it. It’s this:
And so one ridiculously inconvenient moment in real life (I had to detour around my usual route to avoid the closed sidewalk), prompted an unexpected laugh that help brighten my mood, at least for a moment.
It was a less-than-stellar run to be sure:
I’m not out of my hole yet. But sometimes the only way out is to go down.
So what have I been doing for the last hour? I’ve been writing about holes. What’s it look like I’ve been doing?