So much of our consternation and anxiety come about because we are oriented against the way life is. When you’re oriented toward always being right, it hurts real bad to be wrong. When you are oriented toward being perfect, you get defensive when it is insinuated you are not. And when you are oriented toward projecting a certain image to the world, you brace yourself against anything less being portrayed. All this fighting against the natural way of things creates anxiety. We spend a lot of energy trying to turn back the tide. You don’t need to be right. You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be anything.

It’s winter now, and the world is shutting down, going to sleep for a number of months. But we always want to be growing and moving forward with things. It’s time to go inside, go to sleep, regroup and come back next time. We spend our lives fighting death, though our lives are oriented toward it. It is that to which we travel. Then when someone you love enters into it, you fight with grief, like it is not supposed to be. We have a hard time reckoning with the deepest reality of life.

When it is your time to be sad, you should enter it fully. It has its work to do, just like all your other emotions. You will move onto another one when you are done with that. When it is my time to be sad, I actually feel better when I give into sadness rather than trying to fight it, mitigate it and get happy. Being oriented toward happiness when you need to be sad creates an internal mashing, like being on the gas and the brake at the same time. That is more unpleasant than the sadness itself. The sadness is warm and meaningful.

We are not good at entering into darkness as a society, either: admitting we’re wrong and not a smashing success. We need to be able to enter into it, say we don’t know and we’re unable, and give ourselves over unto death. It will be more productive if we allow ourselves to enter it and stop fighting it.