Dark Hours

Rilke said he loved the dark hours of his being. He saw value in the difficult, and perhaps even a way of falling in love with our sadness. By contrast, in our age of positive psychology and the relentless emphasis on curative measures for what are typically labeled emotional maladies (anxiety, anger, melancholy and the like), we would rid ourselves of the difficult, no matter the cost, whether through new beliefs in systems that promise us freedom and more happiness, or more often by way of the credentialized, through counselors, therapists, and an endless array of medications with as many side effects as solutions to our perceived problems. Imagine, however, for a moment, sitting down at the end of the day with no digital distractions, and with no noise other than the sound of your own breathing, alone, in your living room or bedroom. After a few minutes of uninterrupted time with yourself, with no deliberate thoughts about tomorrow, or of troubles already past, you might notice a lingering sense of emptiness. Or sadness. Or perhaps boredom. Or maybe a tinge of rage, for no apparent reason at all. And rather than dismissing any of these analytics, or framing them as inherently negative, instead, you choose to lean into the experience. You decide to trust what you notice—this hint of the harrowing—not as antithetical but instrumental to your becoming. Rather than distancing yourself from the experience, by naming it, terming it and manipulating it, as a feeling you “have” in the moment, you simply allow yourself to feel, to be touched by and in touch with this invisible and apparently elemental dimension of your self. This kind of exercise seems entirely unlikely, if we are more interested in joy than sorrow, or equanimity over evolution. But what about the possibility of being fierce with reality? What about trusting the whole of our experience: the bright and the bleak, the colorful and the gray, times delightful and those dark hours to our dismay? We might smile a little less. But we also might discover a more robust, real, and appropriately complex way of being, with ourselves and the world around us. We might learn in times hollowing, a hallowing, and that agitation, confusion, and sorrow are less feelings we have than dimensions of who we are, realms we need not fear and can courageously traverse, transforming us as they will from the inside out.