If lockdown has got you feeling like a rat in a box, you’re not alone.
Endless deprivation of human contact, no variation in environment, long periods of sedentariness, and perhaps even falling foul of the COVID 15 – gaining fifteen pounds of lockdown weight from mindless binge comfort-eating. Bloating and inflammation and existential ennui.
This is all “normal”.
But normal doesn’t mean optimal.
And normal doesn’t mean acceptable.
You do not have to live like this.
Here’s how you can take your life back.
Choose Your Meaning
Viktor Frankl came to this conclusion when he was taken to the Nazi Death Camps. When his manuscript was ripped from him and burnt, and his wife was ripped from him and burnt, he decided they could take his freedom but they could never take his liberty.
He found that salvation was in love and through love. He found that one could access a state of dignity in suffering – and enduring that suffering with head held high was meaningful.
They might take your freedom, but they can never take your ability to choose your response in any given moment. You are not a product of your environment. It is difficult to refuse to succumb to evil when evil is all around you, but between stimulus and response there is always a space.
Theodore Adorno asked,
After Auschwitz, how can there be poetry?
Humanity has been barbaric to one another since the dawn of time, and will continue to do so until the species fizzles out or ends itself with a bang. We make poetry and read it and share it and enjoy it precisely because we need a salve for the soul in times of turmoil.
Joseph Campbell said,
Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.
So you designate your own meaning.
Life is chaos and entropy, but you can fashion something, as Ernest Becker says, as an offering to the life force, your own special drop in the confusion.
Pivot into the Pain
Comfort deludes us.
Comfort is not comfort. It is actually pain. And it’s how they keep you placated, keep you servile and submissive, meek and compliant, passive and malleable.
Look around you, as Marcus Aurelius once did, and ask yourself if this was what you were born for? To lie swaddled in your comfortable warm bed, whilst every other animal gets to work and embraces stress, obligation, suffering, and heartache.
If they ripped it from you tomorrow, would it be a great tragedy?
Or would it be an opportunity?
Joseph Campbell, again, said,
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
What do you fear right now?
There’s your answer and guiding light. Stride boldly towards that and you will find your meaning.
The moment before an ice-cold shower never stops filling us with trepidation. But you always emerge reborn.
Fighters feel fear before stepping in the ring, but it’s in those precious moments of pain and discomfort that they unlock freedom.
Read High Literature Voraciously
The Great Books offer comfort and companionship. They give you room for introspection, sharpen our skills of empathy, and teach us how to live.
What are the Great Books and how do you read them?
Any book part of the Hardcore Literature Book Club is a great read and worthy of bringing your whole self too: Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Persuasion, In Search of Lost Time, to name just four Big Reads.
You don’t read these Great Books – you live them.
You consider the themes and preoccupations of the world, and befriend the characters that people it. You weigh and consider, reread and relish, and hold passages up to the light like diamonds to see how they shine.
You rip apart the great poets (Browning, Dickinson, Shelley, Blake, Whitman), chant them aloud to yourself, until you possess them by memory.
And whilst you’re reading High Literature, there are tons of other negative things you are not doing. You can’t be scrolling through clickbait hate articles, mindlessly inhaling vapid social media updates, or letting your emotions be taken hostage by propaganda news shows whilst you’re reading the great books.
Find Your Tribe
Books connect us.
Reading might be a solitary activity, but it’s always, at its core, communal. We talk to the author, and that talk transcends time, language, borders, boundaries.
When we read Tolstoy and Shakespeare, we learn to talk to ourselves.
When we read Austen and Cervantes, we learn to talk to others.
And when we talk to one another about all this reading and thinking, introspection and reflection and self-talk we’ve been doing, we tap into something primordial, eternal, nourishing, rewarding, and deeply meaningful.
You don’t have to be religious, secular, or spiritual to designate something as scripture.
The Bible, Koran, and Eastern texts are important for everyone, irrespective of their culture, to read and understand. But you can designate where you find God, and you can designate what form your God takes.
I read the Great Books because they connect me with something higher. So I give them the space, the quiet, the consideration they deserve. When I come to the page, I’m pulling up a pew in the Cathedral of my Soul.
You might find your scripture when you hit the running track or hiking trail.
You might find meaning at the bottom of your breath.
You might find meaning in cooking or crocheting, painting or parkour, music or meditation.
If you find some semblance of meaning in reading the Great Books, then you’ll be right at home in the Hardcore Literature Book Club.
