A number of times over the years I’ve had reason to remind myself that every moment is just a snapshot of a larger timeline, that “this too shall pass,” and that the dominant concerns of any given moment will at some point perceptually diminish until they no longer occupy any of my time, energy, or worry.
This bit of fortune cookie wisdom is obvious to the point of silliness intellectually, but can drift out of reach, emotionally and intuitively, during periods of intense distress and grief and tumult.
It’s one thing to know that the suffering of today will eventually dissolve into some new emulsion, but another entirely to inject that knowledge into one’s latent, understood, felt reality in the moments in which it would be most beneficial to do so.
When things are going really wrong, the sharpness of the contrast between where you were and where you find yourself can be so striking that the idea of change—and especially positive or even neutral change—can seem not just unlikely, but orthogonal to the variables in play.
It’s not just difficult to imagine things trending in a better direction, then: the concept of “better” can start to seem incompatible with what life has become.
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