The Image

There was a cartoon that sticks in my memory from a bookstore I used to frequent.  It showed an archetypally old man--wizened, bent, with warts on his nose and a cane by his bench--who was beaming at a flower that had grown up through a crack in the sidewalk.  Around him were anonymous corporate buildings, and people passed by in their personal bubbles.  But his attention was on the flower.

The old man on his bench could have been in a much darker state.  He could have been focusing on the alienation of people around him.  His age and the nearness of death could have filled him with fear and denial.  The coldness of the urban environment might have seeped into him and left him scared or hopeless.

But where he put his attention was on the small expression of life and beauty amidst what seemed flat and lifeless around him.  That gave him pleasure, and hope, and companionship.  The rest of life went on as usual, but in his life, in hisfield of vision, life was full of flowers. 

Now, you might argue that he's deluding himself, that the flower is so fragile and ephemeral in comparison with the rest of the scene, and he's ignoring that truth.  You certainly could see it this way, but in my view, that perspective is one of the traps of, especially, depression, that for various reasons you become attached to the grayness.  If you've lived with depression for some time, it may have gotten so familiar that to challenge it is scary.  It's totally understandable, and yet there are other ways.

The Practice

One of the deadly things about depression and anxiety is the inflexibility of perspective, the way these moods act like black holes, sucking in the light around them and making the world appear pervasively dark.  The old man could have taken in the city and cast that sterility onto the flower.  And yet, that wouldn't have been true:  the city feels sterile and the flower is alive and growing.  There doesn't need to be a tug-of-war over which perceived truth is the right one.

There are gaps between what seem like the rigid concrete slabs of depression and anxiety, where, if you put your attention, you can see something full of life and not gray at all. 

For instance, a client of mine once described a practice she made up after we had begun talking about these ideas.  She had to drive about 40 minutes to work, and often during the mornings, would find herself feeling bleak and flat. Sometimes even nature would collaborate with her mood and the fog or overcast would deaden the light, the type of light that a friend once described as "driving the artists indoors." 

But we were working on not fighting with her mood, so she began experimenting with exploring the visual realm in front of her-the cars, highway, trees, fields, hills-and without trying to heave herself out of the depression, looked for what might feel different than the seemingly monolithic heavy mood.

What she found was that, by allowing the depression to be what it was, she could actually free up attention to find the spots of beauty around her.  On one drive it would be a big oak tree that would give her a surge of the experience of beauty.  The next drive that tree would be engulfed by the grayness of her mood, but a hood ornament on a jeep would provide that surge. 

The objects were not important.  What was important was that, when she did not find it in one place-say the tree that struck her as so noble yesterday-she did not panic or fight, she just kept looking, with faith that the beauty was out there to experience if she just stayed with it.  Rarely was her mood so thick that she couldn't find beauty, and over time those moments became more frequent, offering themselves even when she was depressed.

The Effect

The impact of such a practice can be powerful.  In the short run, what happens is that the experience in the moment connects you up with a non-depressed, non-anxious part of yourself.  As a direct experience, and not merely a thought of what is supposed to be beautiful, it helps pop you out of the despair or fear of the moment. 

But in the long run, practicing beauty will cut away at the underpinnings of the depression or anxiety, which tell global stories about the unsatisfactory and unsafe "nature" of life.  Now, the mind might be sort of convinced that the Van Gogh is great and wonderful and beautiful, because people tell you it's so and you want to believe it.  But just because the mind buys it doesn't' mean the brain is fooled.  The brain knows whether it's being stimulated by direct experience or by memory and desire, and the difference is radical.  Once you know that the snake in the path is a stick, you would have a hard time conjuring fear in looking at it.  You could tell yourself, it's a snake! a snake!, but your brain will just shrug.

So the impact of a practice of finding the experience of beauty is that it gives direct, undeniable (to the brain, at first) evidence that depression is not monolithic, that the experience of fear is not all encompassing.  And as that truth sinks in, future experiences of wild mood will not grab you so firmly because a deep, fact checking part of your mind and brain will simply not believe it.  Sort of a, yeah, ok, so you say...

Beauty, for the sufferer of depression or anxiety, is not at all trivial. 

(As I said, next month I'll take up the second part of this question, why "trying to figure it out," in relation to chronic unhappiness, doesn't work. Stay tuned.)