BURDENED

The word came to me with sudden and rather unwelcome clarity after two sleepless hours this morning early.

Burdened.

I'm feeling burdened. Weighed down by... everything.

It's a feeling I have been resisting because it's uncomfortably close to self-pity, which is something is deplore in others and despise in myself.  But this is a little different from self-pity. How can I describe it? I tried to define it the other day when I wrote about alienation, the sense of not belonging, of being unmoored, adrift. But I think now that "burdened" describes it better. It's a sense of heaviness, of being deprived of both the motivation and the ability to move.

I feel burdened by possessions, by everything that, with Ellie, I have gathered around me over the years. The art on the walls, the books, the furniture. It all weighs heavy. Even the house, the garden... There's a place in my mind where I'd like to be rid of all of it. Not that I want to be a homeless hermit, obviously; no, it's the responsibility of owning all of it that feels like such a weight. 

I feel burdened by the daily routine, the chores, taking Jake out for his morning walk, his evening walk, helping in the kitchen with the chopping and dicing, the dishes after meals. It's all so familiar, so rote, so, well, necessary. I'll admit it, there's some rather unworthy part of me that just wants to have all those things taken care of for me, some part that wants to be relieved of the responsibility and just feel, well... unburdened. 

I feel burdened by my body, burdened by its familiar aches and pains, by a leg that hasn't worked quite right since my hip surgery, by the superfluous five pounds that I seem unable to lose. I feel burdened by the body's faintly ridiculous wants and needs. I feel burdened by its age.

I feel burdened by the constant flood of news, events in the world that I know to be beyond my control, by the rank stupidity of some and the greed, ingenuousness and mendacity of others. I feel burdened by the rightward social and political lunge in this country and throughout the world that is so far from my own vision of compassion, mutual concern and care, a common humanity. I feel burdened by the conviction that the human species is bent on its own extinction. 

I feel burdened, too, by the feeling of being burdened. 

I struggle with these feelings. I try to resist them with the exercise of intellect, the power of reason. The wiser path, I think, is to allow myself to feel them to their fullest and work through them. The simple act of writing them down like this is its own form of healing, a means of dis-burdening, shedding some of the weight. And meditation helps. I step back, in meditation, acknowledge the feeling, and see it all from a different, more distant perspective, losing some of the attachment that takes pain and turns it into suffering. 

So there it is. The burden. There's an old spiritual hovering somewhere at the back of my mind, the one that so well gives voice to the deep longing to "lay that burden down." I take comfort in knowing that I'm not alone.