Life is, very simply, hard.
I keep a decent bookcase in my office with what I consider to be a nice collection of books spanning many different subjects. Some of them are, I suppose, quite morbid and I often get asked questions about them. I also get asked why I have a replica of a human skull on my desk.
The answer to all of this could span a fair few flowery pages, but it could also be extremely simple to the point of perhaps seeming silly. I say that because my instinctive response is: “Why not? Why shy away from any of that?”
I work and AM a psychotherapist, and as such I find myself on what feels like the front-lines of what it is to be at our most human and vulnerable. I do my best to provide an approach and an environment that makes it as easy as possible to be open and transparent without needing to make any compromises. As such, it’s important to make things as comfortable as possible.
That being said, I am not here to provide positivity or motivational speeches. Although I may do that on occasion (God forbid!), it’s not the true goal of psychotherapy. As grand-father Freud once said in a letter, "The times are gloomy. Fortunately it is not my job to brighten them."
The real goal is to find one’s own personal truth.
And there are plenty of terrible unspoken truths lying dormant in the recesses of our minds that we all try to forget about. They are the questions that humans have been asking since the beginning of time: “Who am I?”, “What is the meaning of this?”, and most terrible of all, “Why do I have to die?”
The frailty of our existence, its lack of inherent meaning, our own mortality and loneliness, the irreversible passage of time, and the heavy burden of responsibility for how things play out are the fundamental parameters of human existence which we cannot escape, no matter who we are and no matter how we choose to live.
If anything, behind all our worries and concerns and all of the so-called symptoms that we may manifest, lies, I suspect, our fear of knowing the real truth of how temporary we all are.
And yet here we are, trying to make the most of it. Some of us try to ignore it, some of us try to rationalize it, some of us try to embrace it, and some of us keep morbid bookcases and skulls on the desk. But the fact of the matter is that it will still be scary no matter what we do.
We could lose ourselves in philosophical musings and esoteric expeditions with the hope to find answers to the big questions, but we most likely won’t find anything that will be satisfying enough to put our minds at ease. And that’s fine. We can’t change that, so we might as well try and accept it as much as possible.
The real question is, what do we do in the meantime? And that is perhaps the only question that matters.
