This Too Shall Pass

Betsy Withycombe

If it isn’t detrimental to your mental health, take a moment to consider a terrible time in your life. Revisit, from a safe distance (and with new perspective), all of the anxiety, doubt, and fear you felt during that particularly rotten season. Now, before carrying on, smell the scent of the rosemary you planted wafting in through your window on the breeze. See the cardinal, come to greet you, on the railing of the back stairs. Listen to your partner singing in the shower. Taste that juicy green grape from the bowl in your lap. It must have seemed, once upon a time, like the peace of mind you know in this moment was impossible. And yet, here you are.

Learning to sit with awful feelings is something that we must be taught and, unfortunately, our society does a bad job of teaching it. We don’t offer enough explicit lessons in quiet persistence to our children and, as adults, we don’t make the time to study this kind of patience with ourselves. Out of great love we rescue and fix and soothe emotional discomfort as quickly as we can. We’re certain that to be burdened is to live half a life; that if we’re forced to bear witness to the unthinkable, the unbearable, it will be too excruciating to survive.

Pause again, to consider the people you know who’ve faced grave struggles and nevertheless have full and beautiful lives. Their senses of humor make you laugh out loud until you have tears in your eyes. These are also the generous people who remember your lactose intolerance and bring you pints of coconut ice cream when they stumble upon them in the grocery store’s freezer section. Sometimes, in the midst of their worst times, the trammeled continue to donate to cure diseases and they grow vegetables in an expansive garden plot. The harassed press their linen pants before running boring errands on a humid day. There are beleaguered people who are forever planning and behaving as if better days will surely come.

Consider the superstition that bad things happen in threes. Some researchers believe that its origins are Celtic, because the theme of “threes” runs through many of the culture’s stories. Others maintain that bad things happening in threes had its beginnings in Appalachia. Believe it or not, there are some historians who think that the superstition of threes comes directly out of the Crimean War.

Psychologists maintain that our brains like to look for patterns in order to make sense of the inexplicable. Some theorize that bad things happening in threes begins when the first bad thing leads to anxiety, which then causes us to make mistakes, which then leads to the two other misfortunes. This sensibleness reminds me of when my husband tries to make nature all about fractal geometry instead of just letting me enjoy trees without math. Unlike social scientists, I prefer to think of the superstition of bad things coming in threes as hopeful. People who believe in the magic of threes are telling themselves there is an end in sight to their hardships.

This sort of resilience is an important survival skill, but I think endurance is equally important, because the worst part about troubling times is having to summon the necessary patience to wait for them to pass. Sometimes bad things don’t make sense, no matter how you frame them, and one must simply wait them out. And you can’t quit while the story is still unfolding.

Personal experience has taught me that a certain level of malevolence is unsustainable. I’ve seen how maliciousness will reach a toxic crescendo and then burn up within itself. With some (albeit notable) exceptions, criminals are caught, dictatorships fall, wars end, gossip proves untrue, and bullies move on or get their comeuppance. I’m able to summon my own fortitude, in what appear to be the darkest of times, because I’ve survived all of my worst days.

This isn’t to say that one should just sit and wait for a solution, an answer, or relief. Patience and action can occupy the same space. While I might, occasionally, accuse my husband of toxic positivity, he has a point when he says that it’s easier to be a pessimist or a cynic than it is to be an optimist. Pessimism requires nothing of us, no effort, no responsibility (and no blame). A pessimist doesn’t require herself to undertake the hard work of emotional fortitude. Giving up is easy. Holding on to hope while we wait and work inside the storm of terribleness is a lot harder.

The companionship of others who are similarly clinging to the life-raft of hope is a comfort. Even the smallest of good works in the name of love and humanity can bolster spirits. Though often attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., it was Unitarian minister Theodore Parker who first preached a sermon in 1853 about the seemingly unbearable length of the “arc of the moral universe.” In doing so, he reminded us of the patience required of those who know things can be better. And, if we know things can be better, then we have no choice but to both want and work for them to be better. Don’t give up. Do not give up now, when, as well as before, time is a true friend of the aggrieved.