DISTRESS

Dear Harry,

This will be a hard one to write because it's so hard to describe in words. I wish we could sit down in person to talk about these things. Not possible, of course. But I wonder if you ever experienced anything similar to what I'm experiencing right now? 

I woke this morning once again in deep distress. It's not depression so much--though that may be a part of it. More accurately, it's sense of dislocation, of desperation, a sense of having been cut adrift from the moorings on which I have relied these many years and heading uncontrollably downstream toward some unknowable disaster. 

All my life I have considered myself a rational man--reasonable in all things, intelligent, well-thought of, relatively calm and relatively secure. Of course I have had my moments of insecurity. There have been worries about money along the way, and worries about jobs: where would I find the next one? And the personal ones: am I good enough? Am I happy? And so on.

But I have always had what I think of as the moorings, the basic truths about myself and the world around me, the things I can rely on. This feeling is different. It's not so much in my personal life. I have family, friends, relative financial security, a social environment that is by any measure enviable, privileged. I live in a neighborhood that is protected from the instability that threatens others.

No, this dis-ease is bigger than all that, bigger than my little self, bigger than the reasonable, thoughtful and considerate man I still believe myself to be. It's existential. That big. When I say I feel unmoored it's in the bigger context of a world in which I no longer feel at home, where all the values I once cherished, and still consider in my heart and mind to be foundational have been cast aside in the rush toward a future that is now uncertain--not only for myself but for humanity at large.

Even here in my own house, amongst my own family and friends, I am oppressed down the the roots of my being by this feeling of existential not-belonging, of being superfluous, superannuated, irrelevant. 

Is it age, Harry? Did you begin to feel the same when you were my age--not long before your death? I know that's a part of it. The alienation echoes what I'm feeling in my body. Not quite there. There is the pain, of course, that results not only from my hip replacement surgery but occurs everywhere--knees, feet, neck and back. The body ages. Nothing to be done about that except to keep as fit as diet, exercise, rest and medical attention will allow. 

So yes, the body is a part of it. And no. The distress is much bigger than the body. And in its way more painful because it is all-consuming. I find it helpful to sit in meditation and am grateful for the now more than 25 years I have dedicated to learning, learning, learning as best I can how to do it, where it can lead me, the serenity it can bring. 

Still that refuge is, in my experience these days, a temporary and deficient one. I obviously have more to learn. But everywhere I turn I seem to "know" that part of it already. I have read it, thought about it, internalized it, practiced it. And still there is something missing somewhere deep inside, and I don't know what it is.

I wish we could talk about this, Harry. I really do. I think you would have some wisdom that I don't. Even though I know you struggled with it, you had religion. Is that it? Faith? Trust in some power greater than we foolish human beings. Something beyond both reason and unreason? Salvation? Redemption? Belief in an afterlife, in heaven, with God?

I'm thinking now the missing piece might be just... surrender.

With love. Your son, Peter