by Neil Peart
Once I started getting out and hiking in the woods and mountains, I found the same benefits applied. It wasn’t about the beautiful scenery or the peace and serenity of Nature; it wasn’t the looking that mattered, it was the moving. To be on the road, or on the march, that was the thing.
Up here, I’ve found the same “therapy” in snowshoeing and skiing. It’s not like I’m taking much joy from the beauty of the winter woods, for often I find myself staring down at the ground as I plod along, but my mind gets into that “movin’ groove,” and at some point I’ll think, “Hey — where have I been for the past 10 minutes?”
Then maybe I’ll stop and look around at the scenery, with a freshly smoothed-out brain.
And that’s my profession these days (apart from “bird-watcher”); taking care of my “little baby soul.” That’s the way I’ve come to define my life, for now. The expression “a soul in peril” came into my head the other day, and I think it’s apt, for I sure face a whole lot of dangers right now. So far, it has been some help just knowing that, forewarned and forearmed, and I’ve been able to gently “guide” myself along less-destructive paths. (Again, keep moving.)
So far it’s been working okay, but I’m not out of the woods yet, not by a long way. What I really lack is my former power of enthusiasm, of getting fired up about doing a particular thing, or learning about it, so that it became more important than anything else in the whole world. It used to be so easy and automatic to summon that dedication and sense-of-mission to activities like long-distance bicycling, telemark skiing, motorcycling, swimming, learning about art, history, and even the “big stuff,” like music and writing.
These days, there’s nothing I really want to do, in the way that I used to be driven, and there’s nothing I really have to do, in the sense of keeping myself housed and fed. You might agree with a friend of mine in England who has also spent most of his life in poverty, that I’m luckier than some who have lost everything and are poor too. I can partly get my mind around that, but not totally. I don’t feel luckier than nobody, really.
But yeah, it’s true that I don’t have to do anything (for now, anyway), but when you add that against the “double negative” that I don’t want to do anything, then you see the danger.
I mean, I’m pretty wary of the “Why?” question these days, for I daren’t apply it to what has happened to my daughter, my wife, my dog, or my best friend. Far as I’m concerned, ain’t no “why,” ain’t no “fair.” So why get up in the morning? Why pretend to “carry on”?
A writer friend of mine, Lesley Choyce, put the question to me in a letter just yesterday, saying that he was glad I’d found something to keep me going, but wondered, “what was it?”
Well, to tell him (and you) the truth, I don’t know what it was, or is; maybe I’ll figure it out later. It seems I have a little reflex in my brain which, through all the dark times I’ve experienced before this darkest of all possible times, has seemed to hold onto the thought, “Something will come up.” Good enough for now. I’ll just try to “guide” myself gently along reasonably healthy paths, and try to avoid as many of the dangers and poisons as I can. Just hang out, basically, and wait for that ol’ “something” to come up.
At least the snow is back, whipping around in the air today and giving some motion and brightness to a gray day. The snow on the ground remains pretty soppy after yesterday’s rain, so forget skiing, and I think even the snowshoes would become a slushy, heavy mess pretty quickly. So I’ll try a walk down the road. There are only five other houses on my dead-end road, usually only occupied by weekenders from Montreal, so it’s a quiet place to walk on a midweek day.
Joe, thanks again for your letters along the way, and for your genuine concern for me, and I can only report, as usual, that I’m doing “as well as can be expected.”
And as usual, I hope you are too.
Your friend, NEP
[Letter to Steven, who lived near Columbus, Ohio, where his wife Shelly was an emergency-room doctor. I had asked him to let me know how he was really feeling.]
Jan. 26, ’99 Lac St. Brutus
Hey there, Ugly American!
I say: good venting there!
Seriously, well done. I asked you to try it, and you obviously gave it a sincere shot. I could feel the fire and vitriol in those words, right through the cold medium of the fax machine’s digital reproduction.
“How was it for you?” (He asked her politely.) I hope that putting it down like that did you a teensy bit of good, as I have sometimes found it does (at least “on the day”), and I also hope you understand that in any case, it can’t do any harm, nor ever be taken “out of context.” Not when it’s addressed to this particular audience.
For a start, you can appreciate that reading stuff like that doesn’t hurt me a bit. Like I was describing to you before, these mundane things are annoying and unnecessary all right, for everyone and especially for us “walking wounded,” but such pests and parasites in life are not really real, after all. Not like that groin-sucking Cimex lectularius [the bedbugs of Belize] whose depredations are still fully evident upon my epidermis. Now that’s real!
In contrast to the picayune things, certainly I am moved and concerned when I hear about your serious complaints, like matters of health and mental wellness. And that’s as it should be, for I care about you. But when it comes to the other stuff in our lives, I’m glad to know about it, just to be more in touch with your life, but it doesn’t affect me, you know?
Like the way it’s been working lately with Deb and me: we already know we share the big hurt, the massive, fundamental, existential, world-shattering Loss, so that remains understood and unspoken when we talk on the phone. So, like a couple of housewives, we tell each other about the small stuff that’s bugging us that day. It’s just a chance to unload, or download, and often speaking it aloud breaks the “spell” of such troubles.
But another thing that comes through all too clearly is that you’re still feeling so isolated and directionless, and though I understand that, there are some things I’ve learned that I think you might profit from, and in a minute I will tell you about them.
I think it’s safe to say that I have been left even more “bereft” than you, and not only in the loss of my family, but in the loss of absolutely everything that I thought made up my life. My life and “self ” were reduced to absolute zero, and even now I think of my previous self as “that other guy,” and feel we share nothing but the same set of memories.
Maybe the only difference between you and me at this remove is that I have known for quite awhile now that everything was gone, and that I had to completely start over. In the past six months or so, my response to that realization has been to try everything that I used to like, and see if it still “worked” for me, even if in a totally different way. Thus I came back to, for example, reading and walking in England, cycling and bird-watching in Barbados, and since then, motorcycling, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing.
Some things from the “old life” still have no interest, or are too dangerous to mess with, like the emotional power of music, for example. That was a problem, for I can hardly imagine life without music as some part of it, but I had to find a new way to use that power.
Right now, I don’t want or need the emotional engagement of music, and certainly I don’t need the memory-associations of the music that was part of our “family life.” So I started with “neutral” stuff, instrumental music and old standards, like Big Frank, that would “transport” me in the way that music has the power to do, but not take me bad places.
For example, lately I’m listening to all kinds of old cassettes that have reappeared from the basement in Toronto, as boxes of old things get moved up here, and most of that stuff is music I used to listen to, say, 15 years ago; music that engages me on a more personal basis, and can be listened to purely as a sensory pleasure, rather than just reminding me of better times.
Interesting that whenever I try
to listen to music that I have been part of in the past, like when Geddy gave me the CDs of the live Rush album they were working on, it just doesn’t register in a personal way. It’s always “that other guy,” and though the “new guy” I’m trying to construct out of these fragments, John Ellwood, might appreciate the work “the other guy” did, it’s just not me, you know? I can’t even imagine the dedication and single-minded effort he put into that stuff. I still admire the accomplishment, and respect the hard work that made it possible for him to play the drums at that level, but it’s just not me.
I watched my instructional video the other night, just as an “experiment,” and the same thing happened. It was like the guy talking and playing on the screen wasn’t me. I could appreciate what he was doing, and what it had cost him to be able to do that, and it’s not like I considered it all a waste of time or anything. It just didn’t have any relation to the “me” I’m living inside now.
So okay, that’s the way it is. Same thing with movies; any kind of emotional dramas are right out, again because I don’t need that. What Aristotle called the purpose of art, the “catharsis” of releasing your pent-up feelings, is just not relevant to my current station in life. My feelings are fully evident, and fully expressed!
Thus, I watch stupid, unemotional stuff, like Speedvision: the Dakar rally, last summer’s motorcycle races, or even classic car auctions. Or, the other night, I laughed at myself for watching the NHL All-Star game, but just as you’ve found with football, it may be stupid, but that’s okay. It keeps the stupid part of your brain occupied, and that’s the important thing. For whatever you call that “stupid part” — subconscious, unconscious, left-hemisphere — it’s always the troublemaker.
So, here follow some “directives,” some “instructions” which reflect the more useful things I have learned. The proper way to look at these observations is that they are necessarily adaptations. I have found that it’s meaningless to talk in terms of “dealing with it,” or of “working through it.” No. This particular It is not something to be dealt with, or worked through. This kind of It simply changes everything, and there’s no coming to terms with it. No deal to be made, no compromise. (I think Ayn Rand once wrote, “You can’t compromise with evil.”)
Here and now it’s about starting all over again, from the ground up, and as Darwinian organisms, we are expected to adapt to these new circumstances. Adapt or perish. We can’t change what is, or its effects on us and our view of life. That is all done. If we truly want to try to carry on from this dark crossroads, we can only try to guide the inevitable changes in ourselves. We would not be who we are if this was something we could “get over,” or simply carry on from where we left off. Once I expressed the way I see my future this way, “I know I’m scarred by these experiences, I just don’t want to be too crippled by them.”
If there is any point in carrying on, it is not in simply existing, in cluttering up the world with another bitter and nasty old man, or a joyless hermit, or a suffering martyr forever living in the past, and punishing everyone else for what life has done to me.
I don’t like the feel of the word “Acceptance,” the technical term which is applied by the “griefologists” to the stage of the process in which I presently find myself. I found on my return from the Healing Road that after all that time and distance, I had at least transcended “Denial.” But to me, knowing that these things are true doesn’t mean I accept that truth. Far from it. As far as I can see, I will never accept that life is supposed to turn out this way. Especially our lives. It’s not the way I lived, or Jackie lived, or the way we taught Selena.
This is not at all the way I thought the world worked, and after all, it is not “acceptable” that Selena and Jackie had to die. No way. Not in my world. So that world, or that world-view, is gone. Some well-meaning people have tried to offer me what they perceive to be a “comforting” thought of the “everything must happen for a reason” kind, but I shut them up right away (as politely as I can). Somehow they don’t see that it’s absolutely no consolation to look at it that way, and more, it brings up some terrible questions in your head: “There’s some kind of reason? What? They deserved to die? I deserved to lose them? The world didn’t need people like Jackie and Selena?”
Bullshit. Then sometimes my thoughts wander in paranoid directions, or perhaps primal superstitions. “Was it something I did? Did someone who hates me put a curse on me?”
The rational mind can easily dismiss such “voodoo,” but after all, it’s not the rational mind we have to deal with here. It’s the “stupid mind.” And of course, it’s not a strong mind that lies awake in the darkness and ponders these deadly questions.
So, those of us on the “inside,” like you and me, are left trying to “accept the unacceptable.” We’re expected to pull ourselves together and carry on (expectations sometimes from others, sometimes just from an unextinguishable part of ourselves), but we face a pretty desperate battle, after all, for there’s nothing to pull together!
Everything that we were, everything we based our lives upon, everything that we believed is gone. In my journal one time, I expressed the feeling of hurt that I carry around, so similar to the feeling of being betrayed, and I concluded that I had been betrayed, by Life itself, and that’s pretty deep. So, the betrayed ones, like you and me, have to start all over again, from Absolute Zero, and construct some new version of “Life,” one that we can “live with.” No way we can hold onto what we used to believe, and no way we can forget what has actually happened in our lives, and in our worlds. We will never trust Life again.
However, once again, we’ve got to adapt, even to that unbearable reality, or one way or another, we will perish. Period.
So, the list of directives. These theories are sometimes developed from insights I gained from all the “grief books” I read back in London, but that academic basis (which is, after all, only the collected experiences of other human beings, sometimes “interpreted” by those who have studied this dark area) and those insights were only valuable because I applied them to my own experience — what has worked for me, what gets me through these long, joyless days and nights in a non-destructive way.
Again, if it’s true that only Time is the proven healing agent, then it is necessary to adapt to that reality, and it becomes paramount just to “hang on,” to survive, so that the supposed magic powers of passing Time have a chance to do their thing. As I told you, that process does seem to have been at work during my four-month odyssey. Though there’s still far to go down that “Healing Road,” and no end in sight.
One of Napoleon’s generals, Marechal Ney I think, had the motto D’abord, durer (at first, to last). This admirable “first principle” was also adopted by Ernest Hemingway, both as a personal and professional keystone. Same for us. If Time is going to be any use to us as a healing agent, then we’ve got to be around for it to happen, you know?
So, the directives. Here we go:
1. KEEP MOVING. The best, simplest, and most important thing. In the way that marching around the park worked for me in London, or bicycling worked for me in Barbados, I was gratified to find that on my “very large journey,” motorcycling worked for me, and later, hiking.If your “little baby soul” is cranky and restless, you’ve got to take your little baby soul out for a ride and calm it down. Sometimes it seems to go to sleep in about a minute, but that’s okay too, of course (you just want it to be quiet, right?), and sometimes I seem to go into a trance-like state, and I’ll “come to” and think, “Hey, where have I been for the past 10 minutes?” “Far away,” is the answer, and that’s sometimes a good place to be. I use cross-country skiing as an excuse to get out; go do an errand, and have a ski on the way. Or go for a ski, and do an errand on the way.
Either way, it gets me moving, and gets things done. Which is another important directive:
2. KICK YOUR OWN ASS, GENTLY. I’ve been trying to set a few modest goals, both daily and weekly. In the course of
a day, it’s good to get some stupid things accomplished, and off your “list.” I guess because it leaves you feeling that you and the “rest of the world” still have something to do with each other!
Like today, for example, I can think back on sending a fax to my brother on his birthday, leaving a phone message for Brutus at his “hotel” on his birthday, phoning my Dad on his birthday (yep, all on the same day), then driving to Morin Heights to the ATM machine, to St. Sauveur for grocery shopping, and planning all that so I’d still have enough daylight left to go snowshoeing in the woods. And then I could drink.
Not a high-pressure day, and hardly earth-shaking activities, but I laid them out for myself and did them (even though tempted to “not bother” with each of them at one point or another). I gave myself a gentle kick in the ass when necessary, or cursed myself out for a lazy fool, and because of all that, I consider today a satisfactory day. Everything that needed to be done got done. And by “needs” I certainly include taking my little baby soul out for a ride. And drinking.
And there are little side benefits from such activities, like when the cashier in the grocery store wished me a genuinely-pleasant “Bonjour,” and I forced myself to look at her and return the greeting. The world still seems unreal to me, but I try not to purposely avoid contact with pleasant strangers. It wouldn’t be polite!
Another “little goal” for me right now is spending an hour or two at the desk every morning, writing a letter or a fax to someone like you, or Brutus, or Danny, who I want to reach out to, or conversely, to someone I’ve been out of touch with for a long while, maybe for a year-and-a-half or two years. These are friends that I’ve decided I still value, and that I want as part of my “new life,” whatever it may be.