Reasons to Stay Alive

Reasons to Stay Alive is the title of Matt Haig's book about his experience of depression and his journey through the years. I highly recommend it, for one it will foster empathy, even compassion, into your being for those who are "walking with the black dog" as Winston Churchill coined the term. There is so much in such a physically small book that I didn't know where to begin talking about it.

Then toward the end he has a chapter title "Smallness." In it he says, "Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious. Yet nothing is more freeing. To accept your smallness in the world." Now that is something to contemplate and I invite you to do so.

On my first trip to Alaska, I climbed a glacier. A gorgeous, monstrous hunk of ice. I was alone and it was a day of intense quiet. I could hear the ice crackle, looked up at a clear blue sky that went on forever, and sat on a piece of ice that has been on the planet forever. The vastness. It's quiet solitude. All of a sudden, I knew there was a larger connection, a God if you will. Something larger than ourselves as individuals. It has stayed with me for over 25 years. And set me on an exploration. Thank you Mantanuska Glacier.

So find that spot of silence and spend time in it every day. Just being. Not big, not important, not responsible, not anything but you...and time.