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.
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