August 2018 – Tool of the Month – Looking For What Is There

The tool for this month is a skill that involves spotting the aliveness in our environment, when depression is telling us that it’s essentially all grey and dead out there. It never is, but depression can be pretty convincing. So we need to practice, as if we were carefully scanning for the subtle life in a desert, seeing what is already there in front of us, that carries a sense of life and interest for us. Give it a shot, but as I point out in the article, remember that healing from depression is work, and learning new tools requires work and repetition to get the hang of them.

Looking for What Is There

Depression has a remarkably honed capacity to lie to us, especially in claiming that nothing around us is much worth anything, our time, our attention, or our interest. Essentially that’s a defense against overwhelm, when the world has proved to be so intrusive or disappointing that depression comes in to save us from it. But that knowledge is of scant use when we are in the midst of a world that feels pretty credibly to be a waste and worthless.

So, one tool to bring to working on this problem, is what we’ll call “Looking for what is there”. As I pointed out in the article from June, healing from depression is a matter of work, and part of that is learning to use these tools, in the same way you might learn to use a new kind of saw. Don’t expect any of these tools to be simply intuitive, or obvious, in their use. They work, but you have to learn through practice how to make them work properly.

So, this tool is about spotting the things in our environment which actually do not fit depression’s claim that there’s nothing worthwhile out there. To “look for what is there” requires us to question the fixed logic of depression, spotting when it is ridged and monolithic, saying to ourselves, “Huh, maybe there’s actually stuff out there that does feel alive, that I’m just not seeing.” That healthy doubt, and inquiry, allows us to enact this tool, which we do by directing our attention outward, with this question in mind, to scan the environment and all of its objects to find what feels alive to us.

We scan the things around us. Depending on how thick our depression is, most of the things (the people, the trees, the rocks, the billboards) will feel greyed out, pixilated, uninteresting. But using this tool, we don’t stop at that, but rather keep asking, “Where is there aliveness already here?” And if we keep looking, we’ll find it. Something will vibrate a bit out of the grey fog, will be felt in our bodies a bit, will have a bit of color and will draw our interest, and that’s where in practicing this tool we work to direct our attention.

Say we find that the car parked on the corner, amidst fifty other cars on the street, and various houses and wandering humans, for whatever reason (we don’t have to know) carries or conveys to us a sense of aliveness. Our job as this tool-user is to allow the rest of the scene to be grey, and then to focus our attention on the car that sticks out, and let ourselves feel, and especially feel in our bodies, that sense of aliveness. Nothing more, just feel it and allow ourselves to take it in and acknowledge its reality and existence. Done, tool use completed.

The point of this tool is two-fold: first, it is to bring some life into our experience through relating to the environment, for the inherent value of that aliveness; and second, through experience, to prove to our skeptical deep selves, that relationship with the world is possible, and that there is something still out there that is meaningful and not-dead. That’s necessary to show the cracks in the depression story, and show us a way out.

Again, to reiterate, this is all work. Tools don’t always work brilliantly. Sometimes it feels like using a screwdriver on a stripped screw. When (not if) that happens, our work is to trust that there’s other tools available, and to try them (technically, that’s working on the “tool” of faith). But we have to work and practice, and get more adept at these tools. As the brilliant 12 Step tradition has it, “it works if you work it.”