The Snowball Effect

Kristin Cuthriel

Let Us Wake Up

30 Comments

muggy sunset 2
muggy sunset 2 (Photo credit: paul+photos=moody)

Some of you may have read the post that I wrote one month ago called Flying Planes in Heaven- What a Wonderful World.  That post was written the day after my father-in-law passed away suddenly.  We were all shocked.  I had just seen him several days earlier throwing dog toys to my golden retriever in our front yard.  We were to go out for pizza with him the day that he died.

I tell you this- not to create anxiety about death.  Just the opposite really.  Don’t fear death, appreciate life.  Life is precious, and life is short.  We get so caught up in our daily frustrations that we often shut out so much magical wonder.  We are often so full of resentment that we can’t see the good that surrounds us.  We often miss the bigger picture.

For me, the death of my father-in-law was a wake up call.  We need to wake up.  Most of us are asleep.  We need to observe a sunset, a snowflake, a rainbow.  We need to stop for just a moment and appreciate the good in life.  We need to find something positive in every one that we meet.  Life is too short to stay asleep.  Let us wake up!  Go find something good about your day.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Comments

  5. tiny lessons blog says

    I love this reminder! Quite a while I’ve tried to practice living in the now, grateful for what I am, have, experience, but just fairly recently started to observe and enjoy the really small everyday things that cross my path. But we always need to be reminded as it is so easy to fall into a rut that includes worry and stress about things that are not important in the big picture…thanks!

    Reply

  8. Hot Rod Cowgirl says

    Beautifully said and so very very very true. I lost my parents within one year of each other, Dad in 1997 and Mom in 1998…being an only child it was one of the hardest times in my life…we lost my Dad In-Law unexpected too in 2001…my hubby and I went camping with them for Labor Day weekend and we lost him…in 2006 I was diagnosed with breast cancer…truly life is the most precious thing we have. Each day that I get up I thank God and every night I thank God…life is incredible if we will just stop and look around and see the incredible joy, beauty and blessings if we will just look:) My health is fine….the hubby and I chose to do the most proactive treatment we could with my BC….a double mastectomy and immediate reconstruction using my own tissue…God is good and so is life:) I love your blog:):):)

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      • Hot Rod Cowgirl says

        🙂 I do feel very blessed and the funny thing is now that I am almost 7 years out, I seriously forget that I had breast cancer…I look the same and feel great:) I have some limitations with lifting only 10 pounds and being a country cowgirl at times that is a difficult thing but I am healthy:) I was lucky that mine was caught so early and had not become invasive yet…and the odd thing was that I could not feel it but the tumor was the size of a small orange….both my hubby and I saw it after they removed it for the biopsy. My Dr. did not want to wait for the hospital to work him into a day surgery to remove the mass so he numbed me up in his office and took it out…I did fine until the last 5 minutes but began to get queasy. It took about an hour and we had results in less than three days. My hubby was brave too as the surgery huge….the first one was 16 hours long and 48 hours later I had 4 more hours as they could see the transplanted tissue and veins were going to live…so that first week was 20 hours of surgery…I felt it was harder on him and he was great to me:) Loosing my parents was harder as we were close….I was thankful though that they did not have to go through my breast cancer as they would have worried terribly. What carried me through both these circumstances in my life was my faith, God was with me every step and still is:) Keep up your good work as I know how much people need encouragement and hope in our present world. Hoping you have a wonderful super duper weekend:)

        Reply

  12. John says

    What I’ve learned, Kristin, is that waking up is a tricky and difficult thing. . . .

    “Often psychotherapy seems to promise the moon: a more constant joy, delight, celebration of life, perfect love, and perfect freedom. It seems these things are easy to come by, once self-knowledge is achieved, that they are things that should characterize one’s whole waking awareness. . . . We see the books by the mind healers with the garish titles ‘Joy!’ ‘Awakening!’ and the like; we see them in lecture halls or in groups beaming their peculiar brand of inward, confident well-being, so that it communicates its unmistakable message: we can do this for you, too, if you will only let us. I have never seen or heard them communicate the dangers of the total liberation that they claim to offer; say, to put up a small sign next to the one advertising joy, carrying some inscription like ‘Danger: real possibility of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back.’ It would be too honest. . . . Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life’s way. If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people. Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life.” – Ernst Becker, “The Denial of Death,” pp. 269-271.

    This is the crux, as I see it, Kristin. Waking up is difficult, in my opinion, —incredibly difficult. In a certain sense, it *is* about noticing what we normally miss, paying attention to what we don’t even realize we’re overlooking or unaware of, seeing more beauty, more sunsets, slowing down to notice more flowers, showing more appreciation, savoring and relishing more, resenting and being angry and taking things for granted less. But becoming more aware in this way can only go so far, because the underlying causes aren’t being addressed. We’re not inattentive and asleep by accident.
    We’re asleep because the alternative is terrifying—not all of it, but part of it. We’re asleep because death—our own and others’—terrifies us. We’re asleep because we sense that it’s a case where the cure may be much worse than the disease. We’re asleep because we sense that once we actually start becoming more aware of death and how fleeting life is, it’s something that we can’t unsee—there is no turning back, there’s no going back to being unaware, to the comforts being blind, asleep, armored. We’re asleep because it’s painful to feel how little we are here, to feel the sands slipping through the hourglass, to realize how short and capricious human life is. “We’re written on the wind and that’s a lot to haul” (Steve Winwood). It is.

    So much of our psychological make-up can be traced back to wanting not to have to face and feel our own mortality and the fear, terror, panic that is associated with it, and trying to insulate or armor ourselves against this knowledge.

    By constantly denying our own (and others’) mortality, by not wanting to permit it into our conscious mind, by trying to repress and banish it altogether from our awareness, we’ve had to reduce *in general* what we’ll allow ourselves to be conscious of; we’ve had to narrow our focus, lest something trigger us; we’ve had to start armoring ourselves and preemptively excluding things from our awareness if our denial and repression mechanisms were to keep working.

    We can’t cut our awareness and blunt our sensitivities so drastically in such a fundamental sense or area of our lives while not blunting our awareness and diminishing our sensitivities in general and across the board as well.

    What I’m saying is that I’m not sure that the two can be separated—waking up and noticing more and being more appreciative, on the one hand, and not having to begin wrestling with our own mortality, on the other hand. I get the sense that those who are trying to notice more and be more grateful while continuing to repress an awareness of death, are doing very little in terms of actually waking up; that what they’re doing is more cosmetic, superficial, just trading in one version of being asleep for another and perhaps more pleasant version of sleeping, or one mattress for a newer and more comfortable mattress, a sleep number mattress.

    How does one appreciate life while not fearing death? Can it be done? Can it be truly done? Ashrams, monasteries, retreat houses, yoga mats, are filled with people trying to do this—and usually on the cheap. Not getting caught up in daily frustrations, appreciating life, smelling the flowers, savoring a sunset, not being resentful and angry, takes a lot of practice and perspective—the bigger picture. But so much of the bigger picture means dealing with how small and fleeting we are in the scheme of things—our meager scant place not only in the circle of life, but in between these two eternities—the one before us and the one after us.

    How does one not fear death and truly appreciate life? How does one not sweat the small stuff and really become able to stay more present in life—in disagreements, misfortunes, conflict, challenge, adversity?

    To my mind it takes so much inner work and living a certain way to get to this place.
    And the only proof that a person’s studies and efforts were worth it comes when you see a person in a pinch, or when the person gets “The News”—the cancer diagnosis, or when the person is told that plane is going down, or when the person is choking or having a heart attack. And instead of panicking or being in shock, the person is calm, present, accepting, radiant—perhaps still deeply wanting to live, but doing so differently, with more grace and equanimity.

    “The confrontation with death—and reprieve from it—makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful and I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. . . . Death, and its ever-present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we’d never die.” – Abraham Maslow

    “What puts a man to sleep? Everything that is unnecessary, everything that is not indispensable.” – Gurdjieff

    I lost my mom almost 3 years ago; she lived a few miles from me. She was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma in Feb of ’09 and died 10 months later. And I was there with her every step of the way, including the moment of her death; and I was as present as I could be. And I was with my grandfather very often during the last three years of his life, sitting with him, talking with him, listening to him, just being in the same room. I wasn’t there when he died, but I was up until a few hours before he died. I was only 22 or so, so I didn’t understand the process as well back then. And after my grandfather died, I got a lot more serious about this whole living and dying thing and trying to lead a more examined and courageous and aware life. I share all of this just by way of giving a bit more context for what I have written from and where all of this is coming from.

    Thanks, as always, for the thought-provoking article.

    Warmest regards,

    John

    Reply

    • Kristin Barton Cuthriell says

      John, Thank you for taking the time to provide such thought-provoking comments. Your comments are beyond the scope of my post, but I do hear what you are saying. There are many different treatment modalities in psychotherapy. Your comments appear to lean more towards a psychodynamic approach. While I integrate some of this approach in my work with clients, I am more a cognitive behavioral therapist. As far as dangers in therapy, I do know where you are coming from. However, an effective therapist is aware of this and takes every precaution not to retraumatize a client. The therapist is careful to go at the clients pace and not tear down defenses that are better left in place. Sometimes it may not be a good idea to open a certain can of worms- so to speak. I do believe that people can better appreciate the good things in life without tearing down old defenses that they may need. I have had clients refuse to talk about their past. This was respected and they still made improvements in their lives by looking at things from different angles and changing some actions in the here and now. I will stop here. For I could write a whole post in response. Thank you for your well thought out thoughts.

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  14. Kristin Barton Cuthriell says

    Wow. I just read your article about a vision to a better managed care system. I agree that an empathic link between patient, psychiatrist, and primary care physician is extremely important. I am honored that you put me and links back to my posts in your article. Thank you.

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