Embrace Darkness & Light to live meaningful lives

A book that helped me so much to understand the relevance, usefulness, and even the necessity of darkness in our lives is called Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest and college professor in Georgia.

The premise of the book is that we need darkness as much as light, to live meaningful lives.

It is so hard to wrap our minds around that idea of needing darkness for our lives to thrive. The author offers a different way of looking at darkness — not as something to be feared, but as something to be embraced. If you can accept that idea, you will face challenges calmly, and live differently during a crisis like sickness, a pandemic, a war, and even death itself.

She talks about solar spirituality and lunar spirituality.

Solar spirituality refers to a life where everything is fine, and the outlook is always sunny. Lunar spirituality is like the shape of the moon. The moon never looks the same. Some nights it is round, full and bright. Other nights it is like a sickle. Still other nights it is not even seen in the sky. Our life is something like that, with ups and downs, pain and suffering, disappointments and depression, loss and death. Here is a powerful quote from the book:

To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, with sadness and gladness, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it, is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it won’t interfere with one’s bright fantasies of the way things ought to be.

The author seems to be echoing the first century stoic philosopher Epictetus:

“To be lucky all the time and to go through life without mental distress is to remain ignorant of the natural world.”

In the book, Taylor talks about how hard we humans try to shy away from the dark, both literally and metaphorically. The word darkness, she says, is “shorthand for anything that scares me — that I want no part of — either because I am sure that I do not have the resources to survive it or because I do not want to find out.” If she had her way, she’d get rid of everything painful from her own life and from those of the people she loves. The problem is this:

When, despite all my best efforts, the lights have gone off in my life . . . plunging me into the kind of darkness that turns my knees to water, nonetheless I have not died. The monsters have not dragged me out of bed and taken me back to their lair . . . Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion.

I need darkness as much as I need light.

It seems like Taylor is referring to tragic optimism, a phrase coined by Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl, author of best-selling book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

Tragic optimism is the search for meaning during the inevitable tragedies of life. It is better than avoiding darkness and trying to stay positive, says author Scott Barry Kaufman. He is referring to what is called toxic positivity, an idea made popular by positive psychologists in the nineties.

It is an attempt to clean up the mess, patch up the wound, negate the negatives, gloss over grief, avoid darkness, and escape boredom by using platitudes and punch lines. “This toxic positivity is ultimately a denial of reality…because, refusing to look at life’s darkness and avoiding uncomfortable experiences can be detrimental to mental health,” says Kaufman.

Walking in the dark is an invitation to turn PTSD — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder into PTSG — Post Traumatic Stress Growth, because sometimes tragic and traumatic events can lead to unexpected change and unanticipated growth in our lives.

The event itself may change you, but the processing of the event might transform you.

Gratitude is an essential ingredient of that processing. Kristi Nelson, executive director of A Network for Grateful Living, makes an important distinction between gratitude, a momentary emotion, and gratefulness, an overall orientation that is not contingent upon external happenings, but a way that we arrive to life.

After a night of darkness, the Earth spins around and arrives early in the morning for another day of receiving sunshine. Let us copy and paste that earthly ethos into our lives so that we can arrive to life with a smile on our face.

(from Cosmic Kindergarten: Earthly Lessons for a Heavenly Life)