“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.â€
― Rainer Maria Rilke
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Good quote. 🙂
When you catch the flu and your temperature spikes, you get achy and fatigued, have cold chills, etc.. but it’s your body’s response to the presence of a pathogen, trying to make conditions within you inhospitable for the pathogen in an attempt to flush it out. You feel, “sickish,” because your body starts ramping up its production of antibodies, and infected cells begin killing themselves to prevent the virus from spreading. But you can’t see any of this happening on the surface; it just feels like misery until the virus is defeated.
yes, exactly. I never viewed depression or emotional/mental upset this way before. being as it is something I have struggled with my entire life I find myself seeking alternative views on it rather than focusing on the sheer discomfort of the “condition”…thanks for offering your take on it- I find it helpful 🙂
I think there should be a kind of holistic way of viewing depression – research shows that when you’re suffering chronic depression, neurons in your hippocampus and elsewhere in the limbic system (seat of emotions, among other things) start dying. I can’t really say why it happens, but it definitely makes sense – short term memory is one of the processes that get attacked hardest throughout the illness. It might be a way for the body to cope with psychic stress, or something like that. Still, pain is a part of life, and one can never truly avoid it. I think trying to avoid it might not be the most reasonable approach – it’s just one spectrum of human experience and it exists for a reason, surely.
The buddhists say that through affliction, one gains wisdom, and there might be some practical truth in that.
because we don’t wish for indiscriminate change, we have particulars in mind… and we feel when things are wrong, and we “can see where this train is going,” and do not want to continue suffering the detriments of conditions which will not change the things we want, in the ways we want to change them.
So, no, i’m not going to be convinced to be thankful for my involuntary and unproductive suffering.
@clevername: if it was unproductive and pointless, where did it come from? Everything is rooted in cause and effect – nothing happens without a reason. If life is a process of gradual change over time, maybe it’s not meant to change the world itself in some sweeping and dramatic way, but rather to find a balance between you and the world that lets both be changed gradually over time.
Lets not forget that yes this could be a purification process much like lorax’s analogy with the cold or flu, but that sometimes what our body puts us through in that process occasionally kills us. People still to this day die of a common cold or flu even with todays medicine. Also our bodies often react in deathly extremes to conditions that do not need purifying, purging, or ejected from our systems. Allergies. I am allergic to Sunflower Seeds. Deathly. It stops my breathing and all. So yes, it could simply be a needed process of righting things that sometimes does its job right or goes too far, or it could also be a detrimentally destructive process for no proper reason at all. I am not good with words. You all are above me in terms of being able to express yourselves through words, but I think you get the angle i am coming from here.
With that being said, this was an interesting perspective of things that I had not heard or thought of before though. so thank you.
It could also be the maladaption of an individual in response to a malformed environment (uh, the general way a person will naturally feel in response to a screwed up civilization). The thing we call, “the world,” is only a small part of it, and we’re one of the few species that has consistent and intractable problems adjusting to our environment. I think the problem is systemic.