Somedays feelings come rolling in over the hills of the heart and instead of breezing through, they hang in the valley and loom large threatening rain but never fully letting loose. These days are both ripe and muted. And sometimes muted wins the meta-physical tug of war and settles down damp and camps out, blanketing everything with a beige mist. Melancholy is a paralysing non emotion. This indifference towards all things is a void completely out of the moment and answers to no one. It is a bully, and when it smells vulnerability it pounces and slowly sucks the life blood from its prey.
What is melancholy apart from playground anti-hero? A sort of psychic vampire? This abominable grey-ness seems to go after the light, or at least snuff it out when no one’s looking. Some times he comes in the night when eyes are closed and hearts are open looking for easy targets. Once in, he can stick around for a desperate moment or an entire numbed lifetime. He is one of the strangest and slipperiest tricksters in the crime files of the human experience.
Poets throughout the ages have written of and continue to be stalked by this cloaked monster. Sensitive beings are the first to be attacked during melancholy’s massacres. They are often on the cusp of the exact things he is drawn to: hope, desire, love, tactile emotion, yearning, inquiry, excitement. These are delicious nectars from which to suck. And turned in on themselves they are hilarious puzzle pieces for our villain to try and jam together again. It is as if an entity possesses us when melancholy takes hold. Our spirit calls for us from a richer mental landscape, but there are bars on the windows and we are lying on the floor barely conscious enough to hear her reaching out.
How do we get up again? How do we rally ourselves and make a break for it when our arms and legs have pins and needles? The first thing, is to relax rather than resist. Resistance pleases melancholy, it reinforces his sense of strength. That's how bullies work: the more scared you are the less work they have to do. Then, once the walls start falling down you can allow for the spiritual membrane to be permeated by whatever is in that moment. Melancholy wants you to cave in. But a willingness to non judgmentally observe one’s surroundings is this brand of self obsession’s greatest tonic.
There is wisdom in fully experiencing each moment, no matter how uncomfortable or awkward feeling; I have learned through trial and error that repression and denial lead to no paradise. But indulgence is as futile as resistance. So, I let the waves wash over me. Sometimes I have to work my way back to the surface for breath, but I play in them even as I get smashed and tossed around. I honour the fact that the ocean of life is far more powerful than I. So, when I feel too tired for either fight or play, I simply sit on the sands and observe with reverence that from which I came.
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