Living Like You Mean

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The logic has left, I tell you!

It is no longer here.

The logic has left, be sure

For no one stands free of their care

In a recession you attempt your dreams?

In a leap of faith you clutch for stability?

Sometimes, you know nothing

Sometimes, you know nothing

And that's just right.

The logic has left, I tell you!

It's gone.

Try dancing a waltz to Beiber

Or crowning the new King of Holland, Queen.

In the middle of the story, you want to know the end?

In the silence before crescendo, you want to scream?

Sometimes you know nothing

Sometimes you know nothing

And that's just right.

The logic has left, I tell you!

It's totally fricking gone.

Try hoping for that unseen,

Or living like you mean. 

The logic has left, I tell you!

It is no longer here.

The logic has left, be sure

For no one stands free of their care.

Struggling With Balance: How Do I Dream?

Lately, I've been in a struggle to figure out what it means to live well in the context of what you hope for, versus what is. Shortly after I moved to this twin-island nation two years and four months ago, I adapted the phrase "It is time to admit to your dreams!" as the closing tagline of my emails. At first, this was my own therapeutic intervention for the panic that ensued after certain dreams failed to materialise. Then, this turned into a more obscure concept.

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Where my original idea was that you needed to dream big and put the bricks to that dream one on top of the other until you built it, my second idea was that my dreams, and your dreams only give us information about what we want based on the current information we have. Now bare with me, because I'm thinking as I'm typing about this one. What if our dreams are only the ushers to an unknown future? I have to admit, that in my life up to now I have been quite rigid about my dreams. I remember a conversation I had with my cousins who are almost a decade my seniors and we discussed dreams and how many goals we'd achieved for our lives. My older cousins, both a part of the workforce for several years, resounded with "Not nearly all of them." I found this interesting, and probed for more information. One of my cousins said that once you get out of school, it starts becoming harder and harder to control what does and does not happen for you.

Here lies my struggle: while I agree that there are no guarantees in this life, and once certain milestones are achieved, you become even more open to the circumstances of chance - Wait...what? Do I believe this?

Psalm 37:23 ESV / 7 helpful votes

The steps of a man are established by the Lord,when he delights in his way; 

Okay, so no, not really. Maybe if I believed in nothing, no higher power then I'd believe that I become more susceptible to the circumstances of chance as I get older, but here's the real dilemma: free will and nature versus fatalism. If free will awards every human the right to choose good or evil and nature reacts without justice, then how do I reconcile the goodness of God with the consequences of evil action or unjust nature (e.g. Mummies dying or natural disasters)?

Romans 8:28 ESV / 6 helpful votes

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. 

Is this a contradiction? Many others have written about this before me; the struggle of seeing God as loving in the face of all that is hateful and unjust, so I won't repeat it here. I will just say that the latter verse doesn't promise only good in the lives of those who love God, but that He will cause the circumstances of a person's life to work out for good, regardless of how they originated. I would call this hope. One of the main dangers in the condition of depression is the complete loss of hope. Despair is the space where a person becomes convinced that nothing will ever change. My main focus in this post is on the idea of dreams as our vehicles to move through life and on living well as a result. A few posts ago I wrote about the importance of movement in keeping us hopeful about our future, and this is the next step.

What if one of the major causes of despair is that we consider our dreams as destinations instead of vehicles? In a world like ours where goodness is not the only factor at work, it means that 100% of outcomes can't be good. It means that everything we hope for, won't happen. This is true, but where God's promises step in there is hope - regardless of how events originated, God causes things to work together for good. Hope! If you believe Romans 8:28 then you have something to clutch to - something good will come out of every bad thing. If you believe in Psalm 37:23 then you can calm some of your existential angst with the hope that your delight in God and prayerful seeking might mean that you make better decisions than if you just tried to orchestrate your life on your own. Hope!

I hope you take this post in the spirit in which it is intended - this is a discussion, as always and in this particular post, you all peek at one of my struggles. I don't mean that the presence or absence of dreams is a direct correlate of depression, although it is well known that hopelessness is a clear feature of the condition. This is not a condemning position, nor one meant to offer causation for depression. Neither is this post intended to replace medical treatment or professional therapy. Take care of yourself as much as you can. This post is intended to raise the subject of dreams as energy that drives us forward. The intention here is to challenge you in the way you think about the things you hope for - MUST you have them exactly, or can you accept that your pursuit of dreams (whether they come to pass or not) might play a crucial role in walking you through the life that God intends for you?

Sigh: Love As it Was Made To Be

Sigh No More

Serve God, love me and mend

This is not the end

Lived unbruised, we are friends

And I'm sorry

I'm sorry

Sigh no more, no more

One foot in sea and one on shore

My heart was never pure

And you know me

You know me

But man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

Love it will not betray you

Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free

Be more like the man you were made to be

There is a design, an alignment, a cry

Of my heart to see,

The beauty of love as it was made to be

- Mumford & Sons

Love as it was made to be...

I haven't posted recently because I feel bombarded by the details of my own life. Yes, therapists feel like that too. So much is going on that it's hard to focus. What do you know about love as it was meant to be? I have been faced with a number of situations lately where I have had to explore that definition. It turns out that what you actually do in a situation where the people you care about act badly is where your love level can be defined. Are you forgiving? Do you hold it against the person because they're awkward or not self-aware? In the last few weeks, I've been both the wrong-doer and the victim of bad behaviour, and it's made me think about grace. 

Merrian-Webster defines grace in the following ways:

a : unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification

b : a virtue coming from God

c : a state of sanctification enjoyed through divine grace

I think that this is our redemption right here - in grace, we are made sanctified or regenerated. In our relationship with God, this happens on a daily basis. We make a decision to be a certain way, but then the fallen humanness in us causes us to err. God doesn't hold this against us and end the relationship, but He offers His grace to all who would accept it. He is perfect. I think one of the reasons people find this so difficult to accept is that in human relationships, this is hard to do. Most people distrust others to do right by them 100% of the time, and this is because people are incapable of doing right by others all of the time. It is a form of self preservation to be cautious in relationships, to ask "Do I give this person another chance?" but love says that we must. 

We don't even have to talk about the serious offences that people commit against us, we can start with the little annoying habits of the people in our lives - the passive aggression, the silence, the hostility, the anger. I want to tell you that sometimes, you are a perpetrator as am I. Do you offer your people grace? Or, do you become angered by their neuroses? Today's post is about having grace for the people in your life. It's about holding back long enough to see the bigger picture. An annoying behaviour might be a sign of someone else's prison, rather than their malice. Try to see things differently, and give them the same grace that you also need.  

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Defending My Organics

In biology, an organ is a collection of tissues joined in a structural unit to serve a common function.^[1]

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This morning, I am thinking about being alive. It isn't what you might imagine though, so I'll ask that you bare with me. The living tissue in my body that tells a physician that I am alive does not give a psychologist the same information. Forgive my morbidity, but have you ever held a dead animal (perhaps a pet hamster, or dog)? If you haven't, have you ever observed a healing wound on your own body becoming hardened? The minute blood stops moving through the body, it begins to clot and in the case of an open wound, this is good, but spontaneous clotting can be detrimental. 

Pathophysiology

Specifically, a thrombus is the inappropriate activation of the hemostatic process in an uninjured or slightly injured vessel. A thrombus in a large blood vessel will decrease blood flow through that vessel (termed a mural thrombus). In a small blood vessel, blood flow may be completely cut-off (termed an occlusive thrombus) resulting in death of tissue supplied by that vessel. If a thrombus dislodges and becomes free-floating, it is termed as an embolus.

Haemostasis is any process that causes blood to stop. In other words, if we define blood as our life fluid, a process that stops blood from moving will (potentially) kill us. As a therapist, I am thinking about this, because I wonder if there isn't something similar in our psychology. My theory is this: if a process causes our human spirit to stop, it can potentially kill us. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we might physically die, but I am suggesting that we might stop living. 

Recently, I've been faced with some big decisions about my life, the kind of decisions that take you to other countries and ransack everything that you thought was already confirmed. I have struggled with it, because I deeply wanted my "confirmed" expectations to stay that way. I wanted the things that I hoped for to simply be. It turns out that everything doesn't happen in life the way we expect (go figure!) though. After I finished complaining privately about this, my next thought was to ask myself "What am I missing by assuming that my best hope is the only truth in the world?" 

I imagined myself then, as this organic being, and my psychological state fixated on the one thing I hoped for, but didn't see actualised. I imagined myself slowly hardening in the hope deferred. If a process stops my psychological state from moving (read: growing, adapting, learning the world's truths, discovering God), then I imagine it is potentially killing me - turning my organic psychology into a rigid, dead thing. I don't want that. Have you ever found yourself hardening in a hope deferred? Today's post is about reflecting on your psychological clots - those areas of your thinking and belief system that aren't moving and that might be causing you to stop altogether. 

The good news is that life constantly sends things that challenge your psychological state, but you have to be self aware enough to recognise when you're not moving, or when you haven't moved in a decade (for example). What things do you see in your own life that need to change? Where do you need to grow? My next thought is that I (we) have to become active in defending our own movement. That is, we should NEVER get to the point of feeling fully informed about life, and our place in it. Keep asking questions, keep understanding alternative hypotheses and keep moving.