Over the last year, I've occasionally waxed gloomy to a friend about the frustrations of law school and my fear of not finding a job—or at least, not the right job—on the other side of it. I noticed that he tended to withdraw or go quiet when I launched into this subject. It's not to say he was rude. But however he was responding, it wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted sympathy; I wanted reassurance. Instead, I kept running up against some sort of emotional barrier I couldn't break through.
Eventually I pushed him on this enough that he gave me an explanation. Maybe, he said, just maybe—and this only after I extracted some sort of answer from him by relentless pestering—it was possible that he was withdrawing from me whenever this topic came up because it triggered some part of him that feared my negativity. He was well aware of the precariousness of his own life ambitions, after all. And some part of him (a small, fractional one, he insisted), feared that if he listened too much to my own pessimistic wallowing, it would somehow lead him to lose faith in his own hopes.
I then got all mad and indignant. We talked about it some more. Eventually, he apologized on behalf of the fractional part of himself that entertained these thoughts (his 5%, we now call it), and my wrath subsided. What else could it do? But I was left wondering about the thought process of the 5%, and why it feared so much the contagion of my negative emotions. For me, after all, the pessimism offers a kind of melancholy comfort. It assuages my fears. I'm venting, I tell myself; I'm divesting myself of the bad thoughts so that they lose their power. But for my friend, the same activity seemed to have the opposite effect.
I think the difference may be partly regional. My friend lives in California—more specifically, the Bay Area. And that is a place that believes earnestly in the importance of thinking positively. Over the decades, the currents of New Age doctrine have met and merged with the bravado of start-up capitalism in Silicon Valley, and the result is a profound conviction that one must always assume the best about one's own destiny. If you believe enough in the inevitability of your own success, then you will eventually manifest it into being. So, conversely, if you are always talking about your own deficiencies, then you will inevitability conjure failure into reality as well.
My friend is well aware he has these California tendencies; and he wonders sometimes if he takes them too far. "Am I too grandiose?" he once asked me, referring to the fact that he often talks about his own future as if he were inevitably destined for glory. I told him no; he was doing exactly what he should do, according to the tenets of the California religion. I had just been reading a collection of W.S. Merwin's poems, and I had found a stanza there that reminded me inescapably of my friend. I repeated it back to him, for it seemed to embody the essence of the entire California way of life: "To succeed [...]" writes Merwin, "Deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it/ If you find you no longer believe enlarge the temple[.]" (The solution, that is, to wavering grandiosity is more grandiosity.)
But as much as I can see the value in the California approach, I was offended that my friend did not appreciate my alternative, pessimistic approach. Let us call it the New England or the Midwestern approach—born of cold winters, seasonal affective disorder, and an aging population. This is the approach that prefers to dwell in the negative, because by doing so, one can deprive the negative thoughts of their power to scare. By gaining intimacy and familiarity with pessimism, one can as it were domesticate it.
I had to learn the value of this alternative approach the hard way. As discussed before on this blog, I have always been prone to anxious rumination. A negative thought, once lodged in my brain, will repeat itself incessantly for hours, and keep me awake for as long as it continues, no matter how late the hour.
The California advice to quiet such rumination is to think positive thoughts. "Stop ruminating!" the California religion tells us; "think of something positive! Meditate upon the inevitability of one's own success and glory!" But to tell someone that the way to stop ruminating is to stop ruminating is to assume the solution. If I knew how to stop, believe me, I would! To tell someone to stop thinking negative thoughts while they are thinking negative thoughts is like telling a man on fire that burning up is bad for you. "I know that," he says, "But how do I put out these flames?"
The only way I have ever found to quiet the rumination is a counterintuitive one. It is not to try to fight the rumination; but rather to accept it. Let oneself complete the thought, and it will eventually go away. For the insistence of negative thoughts generally stems from the fact that they are being denied admission. They are knocking because you won't let them in. If you do admit them inside, they suddenly gain composure, and stop nagging at you so aggressively. I've quoted before on this subject the advice of a character in a Steinbeck novel (The Winter of Our Discontent), and I stand by it:
Trouble is, [he says, speaking of a negative thought] a guy tries to shove it out of his head. That don’t work. What you got to do is kind of welcome it. […] Take it’s something kind of long – you start at the beginning and remember everything you can, right to the end. Every time it comes back you do that, from the first right through to the finish. Pretty soon it’ll get tired and pieces of it will go, and before long the whole thing will go.
This is the essence of the New England approach. Let the negative thought inside. Offer it a seat by the fire. Let it talk itself hoarse. And pretty soon one discovers that the reason one was ruminating was that one was trying to silence the negative thought, rather than to hear it out. The rumination, paradoxically, came from trying to "think positively," rather than simply allowing oneself to think negatively and accept the bad thoughts.
It is essentially the same lesson Housman offers, in his great poem "Terence, this is stupid stuff." In this poem, which brings in many of the unifying themes of the collection that houses it, A Shropshire Lad, the poet confronts a critic who tells him to lay off the melancholy verse and say something positive for a change.
The critic, plainly, is an adherent of the California religion, for he insists that life would not be so difficult if we did not make it so through the negative phantasms of our thoughts. But Housman powerfully retorts that the pessimism of his poetry will serve one better, when one is oneself experiencing hardship. It takes sorrowful verse to provide a balm to a sorrowing spirit; forced joviality will do nothing for it (or if one must have forced joviality, the poet contends, it is better and more effective to seek it in beer than in verse).
And so I say we need both the California and the New England approach in our lives. They are the Allegro and the Penseroso, to borrow Milton's images—both are a real and vivid dimension of life; both offer different forms of consolation; neither is superior to the other. They are simply fitted to different times, moods, and circumstances. They are the "fruits of the two seasons" (Blake). California is for summer; New England for winter. When we are in the summertime of life, when our ambition waxes and we are excited to begin the next stage of life's journey, the California approach can motivate us to move further along.
But when we have experienced a setback, or tasted life's bitterness—then it is time to imbibe from Housman's horn. Then is the time for the sourer verse. Bring on, in life's winters, the New England approach.
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