Hitting Rock Bottom with a sense of Meaning?

Sunday, August 1st, 2010 at 6:47 pm

What happens when we hit rock bottom? For some people hitting rock bottom might be a way of life. For others it can hit us through an illness or unforeseen circumstance. It is easy to set goals and move towards them when we have the energy to do so but what happens when the energy seems to have run out? When everything we do seems to be loaded with heaviness and a sense of disconnectedness? When everything we only think about becomes too much?

Sometimes we get confronted with feelings like that in one are of our life and sometimes it just seems to move through us like a hurricane seemingly destroying any opportunity for enjoyment. We start questioning the world around us, our own life and finally ourselves. And it keeps drawing us deeper and deeper within ourselves. And the deeper we fall the more we start questioning ourselves and the more we focus on the negative that surrounds us.

It happened to me many times in my life. I started questioning my life and myself really badly. It was like watching a bad movie. I knew exactly what was happening to me and at the same time I couldn’t help but fall deeper and deeper. The world as I knew it did not seem to exist any longer, yet nothing had really changed – except for myself. Every time it hit me, it felt like my whole life needed readjustments, it felt like nothing was right any longer. It would come seemingly out of the blue. Little did I notice that things were just accumulating. So, I used to fight it until one day, when I had enough and I suddenly saw an opportunity in it. What if I just allow myself to be drawn down. Doing nothing, talking to nobody, just taking time out. Time out for myself.

And then I let go. It was not a good week to let go with meetings scheduled and new projects on the doorstep. Yet, it felt like there was nothing else I could do, nothing else I needed to do. And for some reason I knew there and then that this will allow me to reemerge from my self-inflicted depths. Like the whirlpool in the river, when you get into it, take a deep breath and allow it to draw you to the bottom, don’t fight and at the very bottom, where it is at its narrowest push out of it. So I let myself go.

Something incredibly strong seems to happen when we actually allow us to hit rock bottom with a sense of meaning behind it. It’s like going down with a mission. And suddenly the journey seems to change. Instead of keeping up the fight with ourselves and the world we just let go and find that extremely valuable pearl, that ‘yummy’ part of letting go. And even though we are still falling, we let go of the fighting and when we do that, we start noticing the sounds and smells of the world again. And as we allowed ourselves to fall anyway, we might as well enjoy the moment of letting go for a while and explore the sensation from a different angle.

And then I started planning what I want to do when I resurface, there were so many things that I suddenly wanted to change, to experience. And all my energy went into the creation of parts of my life. And then I liked them so much that I thought I need to get started on this and then I did. The whirlpools get smaller as I grow older but they are still coming my way – and when they hit me, I know the world will look differently once we’re finished together.

And should you ever have the luxury of humour knocking on your door and you got the energy to open the door, please do embrace it.

All the best,
Halka