Count Our Days Rightly

"Teach us to count our days rightly, that we may obtain a wise heart."  Psalm 90.12, TANAKH

I've thought a lot about this verse lately - what it means to count our days rightly, what it means to obtain a wise heart.  At first blush, it reminds me of a science fiction story I read in high school.  At a meeting of scientists, one of their number presents a device he invented that can identify the exact moment of a person's death.  Being skeptical, the scientists ask for a volunteer to demonstrate the machine's capabilities.  After assessing the volunteer, the machine returns a date in the near future for the volunteer to die.  So the scientists table their meeting until the date predicted by the machine to see if the machine actually works.  Sure enough, on the prescribed date the volunteer is killed.  When the scientists reconvene, to a man they demand the machine be destroyed.

To count our days in this manner would mean living with a horrible truth.  I often wonder how I would deal with such knowledge.  Would I throw all caution to the wind and live hedonistically, trying every debauchery known, wallow in excess?  Or would I have a wise heart, allocate my time intelligently in order to accomplish something meaningful?  Or would I doubt the sum of days, deny that my time approached and die surprised?  If it were possible to count up our remaining days, would we do so and face living a daily countdown to our demise, or would we run from this terrible knowledge and deny its hold on our lives?

Happily, knowing the moment of our deaths is impossible, so counting the days between today and that day is also impossible.  The Psalmist recognizes this, so he (the Psalm is ascribed to Moses) offers instead of a particular count a generalized estimate of our life's span:  "The span of our life is seventy years, or, given the strength, eighty years."  Indeed, the Psalmist's estimate is good for men and (more so) for women in this country today:  each of us, if we want to play the averages, can consider our total span of days to be about seventy-five years.  By this estimate, I've got about twenty-two years remaining, so I could chart out a wise plan to spend these years well.

The problem is, as a depressive, counting my days like this just leads to regret.  On the one hand, I look back at over thirty years of being depressed without clinical or pharmaceutical relief (even today, I do not think I function as well as an undepressed person, I find myself limited and hobbled by depression) as time wasted, as life wasted by my not being fully functional.  Each morning I wake up and find I have to spend another day depressed (I'm not depressed in my dreams), so I count another day until I can begin to live fully, wholly, then I look at my remaining twenty-two years and regret that I will probably spend them much as I've spent the last thirty, that I will always be emotionally crippled.

On the other hand, I don't really believe that I'll last another twenty-two years.  Though I try to envision a new next thirty years, beginning today, if I'm honest with myself I expect I only have a couple of years left at most.  While the women in my family usually beat the average (great-grandmother mid-eighties, grandmother mid-nineties, mother going strong at early seventies) the men don't do so well (grandfather mid-fifties, father mid-fifties).  Further, I'm depressed, so I even fear that Nancy and I will buy it in a plane crash when we go see our son in New York in early December.  Or I fear I'm harboring some undetected cancer, or West Nile virus, or some other disease that will spring one me fatally any day now.  I wake up and count each day as my last, each day a depressed day like all those of the past thirty years, each day a day without redemption, and all this leads to a pervading regret for all the life I've missed.

All of the above are examples of counting our days in the sense of "numbering" them, of seeing our lives as having a particular sum of days and subtracting each successive day from that total.  Numbering our days in this sense leads to a focus on the diminishing number remaining.  And focusing on the total and our daily approach of one more day closer to it leads, as the Psalmist realizes, to a familiar feeling that even thirty years "pass by speedily, and we are in darkness."  We've all felt that, haven't we?  I just attended a thirty year college reunion, where it seemed not just to me but to those I spoke with that thirty years had passed in a blink, that it seemed like no time at all ago that we all were college students together.  And though my peers seemed to take a lot of joy in reconnecting so effortlessly with one another, I was left with a feeling of bleakness, of "darkness" that even should I make another twenty-two years, they, too, will pass as speedily as did the last thirty.

Perhaps this is exactly what the Psalmist has in mind.  The subsequent verses surely point to such a numbering when they demand the Lord turn and show mercy, when they beg the Lord to "give us joy for as long as You have afflicted us, for the years we have suffered misfortune."  And though as a depressive I'm way sympathetic to this sentiment, yet these verses seem to result from miscounting our days, not from counting them rightly.  The demand for God to "satisfy us at daybreak with Your steadfast love" so that "we may sing for joy all of our days," though an admirable ideal, seems to spring from an unwise heart, an immature heart, a heart that demands of God reassurance each morning that God loves us so that we can get on with our day.  Again, an admirable ideal, but wouldn't a wise heart embrace God's steadfast love without needing such daily reassurance?  Rather than demonstrating how a wise heart speaks, the Psalmist seems instead to show the demanding nature of the unwise heart.

Rather than "numbering," another way to "count our days rightly" has the sense of "account for our days rightly."  Whereas numbering our days is impossible (its only possible to estimate our days remaining), accounting for our days is certainly possible:  given that nothing is certain, that you or I could go out of this life unknowingly in our sleep, accounting for each new day we're given means seeing each time we wake up to a new day as a gift.  And accounting for our days as gifts leads not to regret but to gratitude.

Now, I'm a depressive, so this is difficult for me.  But recently I've been trying to wake up each morning thankful that I've woken up, that I have a new day in front of me.  And even if this new day is my last day, nonetheless I'm so thankful that I have it.  Further, I know I have it, I did not pass away unknowingly, I am not living this day oblivious to its graciousness.  I am counting this day, too, like I'm trying to count all my days with humble gratitude that, even though I've been depressed, nonetheless I've had these days to live and breathe and work and play.  To account for each day wisely, to realize each day is a gift, perhaps a gift from God, means to see a growing sum in the grace column of our balance sheet:  countless days I've lived (unless I want to break out the calculator), and each one has been a gift.

Further, accounting rightly only begins with early morning thankfulness.  Accounting rightly extends throughout the day.  Today I shared breakfast with Nancy, saw her off to work, visited with my brother, get to write this blog entry, will have lunch with my mother and dad, will prepare a sermon during the afternoon, will share supper with my extended family, will watch "The New Girl," will cuddle with Nance before we drift off to sleep ("I pray the Lord my soul to keep").  Each breath may be my last, so each new breath is also a gift, a very gracious gift (what "right" do I have to live?).  So I should greet each event in my day with the same gratitude I greet each new morning on waking up:  accounting for such wonderful events in my life means I'm overwhelmed by gratitude, by wisely recognizing that God is indeed so gracious to give me this life.

To have a wise heart is this:  to know we can go out of this life at any moment (we are like grass renewed at daybreak that withers and dries up by dusk, says the Psalmist), so we account for each moment we're given as a gift from God.  Such counting is surely "living in the moment" and also living in gratitude.  One day, our last moment will come, hopefully we'll recognize it when it does.  And hopefully, after being thankful for each moment of each day, after counting our days rightly, our last moment will be filled with gratitude long-practiced and the darkness and bleakness of regret will be far from us.  Then, truly, the "favor of the Lord, our God," will be ours.  Thank you for reading.

Pain Tolerance

I like to think I have a high tolerance for pain.  When I was in junior-high and high school, I played football, a sport that demands a lot of pain tolerance:  seems like every drill, every game includes pain that one must simply play through or else sit out on the sidelines.  I've played through a lot of pain, even a broken hand (which I learned about fourteen years later when I re-broke it lifting cast iron skillets), so I tend to think I can tolerate quite a lot of pain.

Two events recently have made me question just how much tolerance I do have to pain.  First, I ran out of Abilify.  Since I'm unemployed and have no prescription drug insurance, my psychiatrist has been supplying me with Abilify through medical samples.  A couple of weeks ago, I ran out and decided, rather than stop by my psychiatrist's office for a refill, I'd see how difficult my depression would be without Abilify.  Whether because of how abruptly I stopped or the efficacy of the med, after three days or so I hit a disastrous low emotionally, so painful it seemed that I had actually regressed since my relapse a year ago, that I now hurt more than I did a year ago.  I was able to tolerate this for only two or three days before I got more Abilify and, gladly, took it.

Then, the very first day of my and Nancy's backpacking trip on the Appalachian trail, as we were climbing five miles of uphill out of Davenport Gap, I pulled a muscle in my left hip.  Now, I've pulled plenty of muscles in my life, not the least playing football for six years, so my pulling one hiking is not necessarily a sign of advancing age (as I seem to react much more often these days).  And the palliative is pretty standard:  give the muscle two day's of rest, then gradually work back up to full participation or, not having that luxury, take pain meds as much as needed.  Sadly, Nancy and I had neglected to refill our supply of ibuprofen (good ol' Vitamin I) before we began, so we were without pain meds.  On our second day, during an initial two miles of uphill, I simply couldn't go on, so we had to come off the trail (hiking an additional eight miles to do so, and being preserved from hiking an additional fifteen miles to the nearest town by the chance passing of friendly locals in a pickup truck, who drove us all the way to Newport).

So how much pain can I really tolerate?  The question is important to me, because part of my depression is to imagine horrible ways to die - a slow, painful death by stomach or colon cancer being among those I fear the most.  As I have romanticized my depression, I've seen it as training in pain tolerance:  so much of my life I have lived in emotional pain - just as real, I assure you, as physical pain - I figured myself for one hardened and wizened, capable of bearing the most agonizing pain.  Now, I'm not so sure.  It's so hard to measure pain:  did my pulled muscle hurt so bad that I couldn't continue to hike because it was, say, a seven or eight out of a possible ten (as I imagined it to be), or was it really a two or three and I was just weak?  Same with my emotional pain:  am I severely depressed, as I certainly felt once the Abilify had worn off, or only mildly depressed and simply can't handle a lot of emotional pain?

Ultimately, there's no comparing one's pain to another's:  we each feel our own pain, and what feels bad really feels bad no matter any "objective" measurement.  Our pain scales are always subjective:  what feels like an eight is an eight for that day in those circumstances.  But I fear that very subjectivity, I fear not really knowing what an eight feels like, and that some day I will truly and fully feel an eight, or a nine, or a ten.  Perhaps my years of emotional pain have not hardened me to pain, but, like constantly worrying an open sore, have actually made me more susceptible to pain, less tolerant.  As I try to imagine the next thirty years of my life, and my imagination does not include pain-free years, I would like to be able to imaging a life much less hobbled by pain than the last thirty years.  If I'm growing more susceptible, then the life I imagine grows less desirable.  Pain hampers my imagination.  Thank you for reading.

To Live vs. Not To Die

Look, I know the difference between living fully and trying not to die:  in the former, I engage life in all of life's dimensions, experiencing life as fully as possible; in the latter, I hunker down in safety, not risking engagement in return for a potentially longer life.  In experiencing life, I may indeed die prematurely due to accident or mischance, but I will have lived more than if I  avoid life's risks and concentrate on safety and security even though I may actually live longer.

Take travel, for instance.  Nancy and I flew to Spain and spent forty days walking the Camino de Santiago, five hundred historical miles across Northern Spain following in the footsteps of over a thousand years of countless pilgrims.  Foreign travel is inherently more risky than staying home:  the flights across the ocean, the prospect of being strangers in a foreign nation, anti-American sentiment, you name it.  But the rewards, ah, the rewards:  traveling through ancient Spanish villages, getting by with only a smattering of Spanish, meeting people from all over Europe as well as from North America, even traveling five hundred miles on foot, all of these enriched our lives immeasurably, we are better people because of them.

But depression, at least in my case, pushes me towards trying not to die at the expense of living, even when I am, in fact, living fully.  For instance, Nancy and I are about to return to the Appalachian Trail to hike one hundred miles from Davenport Gap to Erwin, Tennessee.  One could fairly call this "living."  Yet I have been trying to feel anything but dread, steeling myself for the hike, remembering all too well how my depression came crashing back down on me while hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Main during 2011.  Adding to the difficulty I'm having throwing myself into the hike, I'm out of one very helpful medication that my psychiatrist has been giving to me in the form of free samples because it's too expensive for me and Nancy to afford on our own, so my thoughts and feelings for the past several days have been bleak to say the least.  I fear that I will hike these one hundred miles in an attitude of trying not to die rather than living fully, that I will look back having completed the hike and, rather than being enriched, I'll be entrenched further in doing my damnedest not to die.

Or consider the way Nancy and I live:  we live in a very "green," five hundred square foot strawbale cottage that we built by hand, a way radically different from the norm.  Nancy, I'm sure, takes great pride and satisfaction in the way we live, freely of our own volition:  we don't have to have all the trappings of American excess, we have no debt aside from a small car loan, we can drop everything and go hiking for nine days because we live so inexpensively.  But I find myself wanting a "mac-mansion," the status of big home-owner, the camaraderie of a mortgage, not because I value those things but because, in some way, I feel like a large brick house will be a more lasting testament to my life after I'm gone than a small strawbale cottage that will eventually, after we're gone and presuming our children don't want it, dissolve back into its constitutive parts and melt into the ground.  I find myself overly anxious about cracks in the plaster, natural results of a new building settling but in my feverish mind evidence that our cottage is going to fall down around our ears.  All of this is due to depression, specifically due to this last, dreadful year:  before my relapse, I, too, took great pride and satisfaction in the way we live.  Now I dread too much.

Here's the catch-22:  even though I am living, I feel like I'm dying.  Even though my life is full of promise and wonder, I feel as if I spend each day doing everything I can to stay alive, that all my energy is focused on delaying the inevitable instead of relishing the present.  I know I'm living well:  Nancy and I are still deeply in love with each other, I'm surrounded by my family who love and respect me, I get to spend my days in study and contemplation and writing sermons, good sermons, I'm extremely proud of my wonderful children - I could go on but it reads like I'm bragging.  But one sad thing about depression is the way feeling drives thought, so my feelings of dread tend to push me to dreadful thoughts, and in that thinking I fail to feel alive.  I am living, I know that; I just wish I didn't feel like I am dying.  Thank you for reading.