Sitting in the dark

Sitting in the dark sounds pretty bad at first.
It sounds like 'loss' or 'despair' or 'loneliness'.
In our gut, it feels like 'fear'.

Wake up from a nap on a Sunday afternoon and you won't spend time wondering whether you will live to see your grandchildren grow up.

Wake up from a night's sleep at 2 am and all the existential questions will rise up and, if you're not careful, choke you into total panic.

Because our fears rush to the front of the line in the middle of our night, we can easily decide that darkness is to be feared...and avoided.  Deep in the darkness is the giant monster named fear - any and all varieties of fear -is just waiting to devour us.  Our solution to this situation is light.  Constant, perpetual, reassuring light that casts out our fear and sends it deep into the abyss.

Although, of course, it doesn't.  Light doesn't cast out our fear, it simply blinds us to its presence.  The brightness hides our loneliness for a while.  It offers up false hope to cover sadder realities.  It makes possible a thousand activities to cover over the emptiness of our loss.  Turn up the lights.  Move with the sunshine.  Forget the darkness and go with the light.

Until it kills you. All light all the time will kill you.  Your body cannot rest and repair.  We all need the dark.....and once the dark comes....it's all waiting for us again.

So, just possibly, the problem is not the dark which we fear, but the realities that we cannot avoid when the light is turned off.

Perhaps we could not fear the night, but rather use the night to come to terms with the fear we carry with us. Perhaps as we learn to walk in the dark, a good place to start is to name the fears we carry within: dying without making a difference, being guilty of contributing to the broken parts of this world, being crushed by the responsibility and failing those we love, not having the answers and not even knowing the questions, dying badly and living even worse.

Maybe it would be good to keep a list of the monsters that come to you in the dark.  Write them down on a pad you keep by your bed (because isn't that where the monsters generally show up?).  Naming the monsters is critical. In order to come to terms with our fear, we have to have a name for it.

Are you ready to name the monsters that plague you?

This post was inspired by Barbara Brown Taylor's Learning to Walk in the Dark.  You might want to read it for yourself.