A cloudy, chill rain greeted the middle of Mexico’s long-stretch Christmas which began December 8 – the celebration of immaculate conception of “the Virgin Mary, Mother of God” – and continues until Three King’s Day, January 6. Slithering wet clouds gave mountain areas of Jalisco a hue so solemn – and cold – that some folks seemed downcast.
At the same time, a number of publications ran articles questioning the belief that people generally become depressed this time of year and suicide rates spike. Not so, experts said in these reports: Suicides rise much more at the beginning of Spring.
Unfortunately, no such findings reached a friend who didn’t seem to mind the holiday cold but bent under the emotionally and circumstantially wrinkled weight he was hauling through days that others were inebriously celebrating.
He came with his wife to Mexico, and within a year they had separated. That wasn’t their plan when they crossed the border. Abruptly they’ve had to split their money in a way that blurs how they see both present and future. It’s not the dream they had in mind.
They’re an unusual couple: He is a Mexican-American from Iowa, she’s a Yankee from Vermont. Of the two she seems the most enthusiastic about Mexico. Their first names are unusual, also: He is named Donaldo and has been called Don all his life; her name is Donna. Donaldo, at 74, is older than his wife, who is an energetic 58. To his dismay, Don, former jogger and tennis player, is slowing down. Neither were especially religious when they got married; she’s a “social” Protestant, he’s a Catholic who does not attend Mass, but is enthusiastic about Pope Francis. Divorce is a subdued ongoing consideration.
Don is dismayed by his crucial errors in judgement. Mexico is nothing like it was when he and his parents used to drive down from their home in Pennsylvania to visit relatives. Now the changes give his stomach a dropping feeling and make his head ache. Donaldo keeps telling his wife how good it once was. This subject also has been appearing in the media. It is both good and bad, according to varying reports. And while Donna is exploring a Mexico that constantly surprises her, Don reassesses what their life has so quickly become. He says he suddenly feels like a transient. A bad case of the blues. He tells Donna how Mexico used to be. She says he’s overly nostalgic, that he’s trying to live in the past.A lot of that is going around now. Younger people telling older folks they’re living in the past. Yet you can find groups of young folks doing the same. It sounds more immediate simply because their past doesn’t reach very far.
Johannes Hofer (1669-1752), a Swiss medical student who gave Don’s blues a medical identification, also defined the elements of diagnosis (1688) that apply to this day. He examined two young people ill with inexplicable symptoms: physical (loss of appetite, fever, fatigue, palpations), and mental (anxiety and depressions). Hofer named this new disease by combining the Greek term “nostos” (returning home) and andalagia (pain). He described his “new discovery” as a kind of homesickness. But time and death has broadened that definition considerably, and it’s no longer treated with purging, opium, warm hypnotic emulsions, or leeches.
But this knowledge does not cheer Donaldo. Easy laughter is not readily accessible to him. It is true that, as someone recently said: “A high point in the arc of one’s life yields a meaning that illuminates, makes it burn more brightly.” People who are convinced of this (I, for instance, am not) are more likely to be saddened by reflections on the past. Yet pro football players have short careers – six-nine years. Some are able to go into coaching. The Denver Broncos’ famed present quarterback, Peyton Manning, who seems to be always coaching on the field, on the sidelines, at practice and during extra-session practice. Thus, when he retires (he’s 37 now), most football folk believe he would make the ideal coach, and create a sterling new career, giving him a second arc of memorable accomplishment.
Whatever Donaldo sees as his life’s peak accomplishment it’s plain that he sees it in the past. This is a common thing, just as it’s common for returning alumni to take an admired student aside and warn him\her: Enjoy your college years, they’re the best years of your life. (This was not what I, for example, believed or intended, for in college I was still unsorting the tangle of a chaotic childhood and diligently planning an unorthodox future. Circumstances had taught me not believe the world was especially glad to see me. That meant finding a way through cracks that offered slices of freedom for independent maneuver.) Donaldo gave the impression that he’d had an enjoyable youth. Now he believed whatever peaks his life entertained were now behind him. Someone has wanly said that “We need not think of peaks as occurring early in life.” Actually, we need not think there is solely one arc, one peak to our lives. That was not something Don wanted to hear, but it was something that 74 years should have showed him. There are stretches of calmness, of being at work in engaging activity that nonetheless feels as if time is waiting. Donaldo may be in one of those periods, though his depression suggests perhaps not. He is unhappy, self-lacerating, in a bleak place. He discusses suicide in the context of being unable to move freely, being bound in bed by a snake’s nest of tubes and electric medical devices.
Indeed, depression and suicide, though hardly inevitably twined, are often bound together in social and medical history. Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Van Gogh, poet John Berryman, and a long list other well known “accomplishers.”
But nostalgia need not be lethal, or even threatening. We all have good memories stashed away. And, if we’re alert to the tribulations of life, they can be fine tools to disarm the blues. A young lady I knew during early explorations of Mexico said: “I miss you when you’re down there. But when I do I just run the pictures I keep in my mind, and everything’s fine with those pictures, memories.” Bright lady.
Buddhism often come up in discussing about unsought tough thoughts and images. The reason: Buddhism, when seriously explored, teaches how to choose what’s in our heads. Buddhist teachers, when I was younger, pointed to the Western “monkey mind.” A mind involuntarily jumping from on thing to another without purpose. That led to the observation: “We spend billions of dollars on examining a vast warehouse of subjects. But when it comes to the actual tool we use to find and file this knowledge, we spend little time training its precision. We speak here, of course, of the mind. Thus, disciplined, deep and daily meditation which provides many gifts. Most of all it gives us, with time and effort, the gift of being able to choose what’s in our minds, eliminating scatter-shot conglomerations jumping purposelessly about in our heads.
One teacher in the past was asked by a frustrated student what Buddhism “really” was. The master answered: “Attention! Attention! Attention!” – meaning the attention of mind (including no-mind) and body at every second. The product of hard work and meditation.
Such effort is not inviting to many people such as Donaldo. He’s shrugged it off. “You’re not ready until you’re ready,” Buddhists note. Until then, it’s wise to mine the treasure of smile-producing nostalgia, the great cluster of positive deeds that were not only stunning and educational, but often changed in one’s life forever.
“I wouldn’t be alive now if it hadn’t been for ... I wouldn’t be here now with this opportunity to learn, to enjoy ...” (both of these often arising out of challenges).