Joy

Photo by Cosmin Serban on Unsplash

Sure, there’s not that much of it, but I’ll take what I can get.

I was at the doctor and as I looked out the window at the 40 floor buildings that surround the one where his office is, traffic sounds bouncing off the canyon of Market Street, distracted by the windows across the way, blinds open and people moving inside each distant office, he said to me, “You know what would help, being in nature!”

Nature. We do have a dog, and we take it out onto the strip of grass on Front Street, and we have a lemon and an olive tree that this time of year we drag inside and out to the deck depending on the temperature, but there’s not much else.

There is a trail that runs along the river behind the sheet metal workers’ union hall and the AAA from the Coast Guard station to the Walmart, and it has a pier that juts out into broken pilings you can climb on. There’s a tower at the end with the port of Camden across the water, and the graffiti on the old warehouses over there is pretty spectacular, but the whole thing was a better idea years ago as the pier is now all overgrown and full of tents of the homeless that live here. It doesn’t exactly feel that safe at all hours, or look much like the pictures of nature on Google images.

But the overgrown stuff is the thing about nature. As soon as you stop “taking care” of something, as soon as you stop pruning and weeding, nature takes it back. Maybe this is why I love cities. There is life everywhere. Things grow where they’re not supposed to and an unruly, destroyed landscape is still full of birds and flowers and kissed by rays of sun.

If only we can find this in our experience of mental illness. To a point.

Even at my worst I manage to present pretty well. Sure, my hair is long and a mess but I shave and dress and can usually manage a thoughtful conversation. I guess I come across quite normal, kind of like the community garden, because people keep telling me things like “yeah, her aunt is bipolar but she is so much worse than you.” How much worse can she possibly be?

This is when I equate mental illness with physical illness, because I am a well-tended piece of ground, something that everything has been done to take care of, with something terribly rotten just below the surface. The soil is poison and all is about to die, but children can still skip along the surface and you can still spread out a blanket for a picnic before some upheaval takes it all back and leaves only barren land. I am so sick and tired of people telling me I just seem so well and must be getting better. I’m not.

Nature can’t fake its end. But people sure can. And God, I found a place where nature seems to fake it as well as I do. The flower show.

Still chasing that elusive directive from my doctor my daughter and I took the bus to the convention center to see the horticultural society’s finest. Here was the perfect metaphor for my mental illness, because you could live in these displays and be happy. Full of beauty, Free of the utter destruction just outside. Always knowing that the day after Sunday, when the bonsais are all judged and the path through the root filled forest is closed, the whole thing will be over and it will all come down, and all that will be left are bare floors, empty concession stands, and random pieces of tape on the walls.

The whole thing is a façade. The whole thing is a fraud, and the whole thing is falling apart. But people only see it at its best, when they pay for a ticket and walk through in wonder, where nature is even better than it is outside. I suffer the worst when people turn away or hang up and think, “Oh, he’s OK.”

We have a place on a marsh at the shore so my wife and daughter took me there. We spent a couple of very good days together and when they knew I was safe they left me there for about a week. Like the pier, and the flower show, and the weekend with my wife and daughter it was a time of joy. I made my own retreat. I meditated. I read. I threw the ball to our dog on the beach. I’m very closely studying the Theravada school of Buddhism, which is ironic, because it was developed as a school only for monastics. The older I get, the more I learn, the deeper experiences I have, the more I believe that none of this stuff works in the real world.

A retreat is a lot like nature is for most people. It’s an escape, it feels good, it looks beautiful, and, God forbid, you have to go back to what you’re running from.

So I keep running, and apparently I look pretty good doing it. Everybody thinks I‘m winning. But I’m losing this race. So I’ll stop and look for beauty. And joy. Because it truly is everywhere. Whether or not what you find is worth it is up to you, but maybe to stop looking… Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe that alone is worth it.

Then again, maybe it’s not.