Mark McNease

Oftentimes the hardest part of letting go is simply not knowing what will take the place of the thing, person or situation we’ve allowed ourselves to relinquish. We may think the difficulty is in living without it, but upon closer inspection we discover that the real problem, and the impulse it creates to hang on, is being unaware what could possibly replace it. Comfort comes in many forms, including the illusion of certainty. Our routines, habits, assumptions, and repetitive thoughts all provide comfort—despite how uncomfortable we tell ourselves they make us! They offer reassurance that today will be as predictable as yesterday, and tomorrow will bring more of the same. Sameness is mistaken for safety. It allows us to be less fearful of what comes next.

Knowing that I have kept my life cluttered with the same things I want to be free from requires introspection that makes changing hard. I don’t want to admit these things bring order to my days. I may claim to be unhappy or displeased with my weight, or my behaviors, or my worldview, or my addictions, but they have provided me with continuity. I’ve trusted myself to wake up in the same dream since I was a child being told that dreams were beyond me, that I was limited and destined to achieve little in this world. Whose definition of achievement was another matter, and my resistance to that judgement, that taking measure of me, is among the reasons I survived. I wanted to see what could become of me, what experiences awaited in a new day, and I wanted to prove the assumptions wrong. Ultimately, the voices that tell us we are limited, and that play a part in our refusal to let go of the ordinary, become our own voices, the unwelcome narrator in our minds.

Mark McNease

There was something different about that morning. It could have been just another morning when I woke up feeling stagnant, overweight and overwhelmed. But when I opened my eyes, and my mind worked its way sluggishly back to the ‘real’ dream, the one I call my life, I had an unusually clear sense that the time had come: the time to change things, the time to rearrange the interior of my personal world, the time to shape what I experience as reality and my place in it.

I’d been on the same figurative road for years. I’d allowed myself to settle into a sort of perpetual frustration, and to think that if only I did some thing, or some things, differently, I would find the elusive happiness I’d always wanted but had cynically dismissed as a marketing tool for the self-empowerment crowd. I’d told myself contentment was much more important that happiness – and what is happiness, anyway? A puppy? An ideal job? Or, most probably, an illusion.

Mark McNease

I can’t name a specific date and time, but at some point the past few months I stopped paying attention to the news beyond what I need to stay informed. Is there a significant natural disaster nearby I need to know about? Has a foreign invader breached our northern shores? Have scientists discovered that drinking eight cups of coffee a day leads to a long life or that it causes permanent memory loss? There’s the local political stuff I want to know about, like who the next governor of New Jersey might be, and which dismal choice I’ll have to make next year for health insurance. But the overall big picture, the cloud of dread and anxiety that is our current 24/7 news cycle? I just can’t indulge in it anymore. Very little of it uplifts me and much of it depresses me. It’s as if, given the possibility we are not living in the end times, we’ve collectively decided to make it appear as if we are, like that Buck Owens and Roy Clark song I remember from Hee Haw, “Gloom, despair, and agony on me …”