Shouldn't Life Be Easier?

That was the question, asked rhetorically, by a man who was reflecting while on a ledge slightly below the precipice above the valley of depression. He had recently found himself on that ledge and was surprised that he was there, but more so, he was freightened. Freightened that he might move un-voluntarily into that valley where he had been once before.

What would you offer in response if you were there?

When he was receptive here's some of what I said.

I don't know if it should be easier or not; maybe yes, maybe no. But I do know that when you are in the midst of "a depression" that you lose (easy) access to recollection of the easier times. Because of that it sometimes makes it feel that everything has always been hard, tough. It has a way of also discarding positive recollection in a variety of ways. For example, it can discount the reality of what happened. And knowing that, it can help to recollect some times when it was easier. That can help; that can help a lot. Remember that it is a skill that has to be developed while in the valley.

It also plays the other way. By that I mean that when things are going well and ideally when you are in the "flow," that recollection of the depressed state seems foreign and distant. It's not exactly like that, but it's like that.

Maybe it's a little bit like a bow tie. You have this connection in the middle which connects the two bows. One bow wants to just do it's own thing and to perpetuate itself. Guess what, the other side also wants to do the exact same mirror image thing.

Addendum: A voice with some experience with both the depression thing and the flow thing, thinks, however, that the "bad" bow is sometimes, maybe almost always, more heavily weighted.

My input is that anyone who has ever been in the throes of a significant depression will line up with that comment. But across time balance is of the essence. Just as the universe seems to wobble and at times seems to be favoring one end of the spectrum or the other, if you look at it across time, things find their balance. There tend to be as many sunrises as sunsets but personal habits and acquired tendencies may lead us to favor one over the other.

Nature always gets the last word in.