Courage and Spiders

But there is something in me that I call courage: it has always destroyed every discouragement in me … For courage is the best destroyer — courage that attacks: for in every attack there is a triumphant shout. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The Spider in the Corner

We have a watching problem.

Not a feeling problem, not a thinking problem — a watching problem. We have built, with some dedication and considerable cultural momentum, an entire ecosystem around the observation and narration of our inner lives. Podcasts, threads, therapy-speak leaked into every dinner conversation, a million frameworks for why we are the way we are. We have become, collectively, extraordinarily articulate about our suffering. And yet articulation has not obviously made us freer or more fulfilled. If anything, we seem to have become fluent in distress and not much better at living. Somehow, understanding and theorising have not bred lives that feel well or fulfilled. Perhaps it is really pseudo-understanding, or understanding of just one kind.

I am not arguing against the examined life. Quite to the contrary, examination matters enormously — I would do what I do if I did not believe in introspection. But there is a difference between examination and taking up residence in suffering. Between looking at the thing and moving into it, unpacking your belongings, and calling that depth.

Imagine a spider. If you are like me and petrified of the poor little foe, your first instinct may be to shut your eyes: "Everything is fine, there is no spider, nope, not there." But it is there, and you know it in some capacity, evidenced, at least, by your having frozen in place.

So you open your eyes. Good. You see it — there, in the corner — and you name it, and the naming is the beginning of something. But here is what nobody warned you about: the eye, once opened, has a habit of fixing. You begin to watch. You watch so carefully, so consistently, that the watching itself becomes the thing you are doing with your life. Your life spins around watching that little arachnid, so that it begins to become all that you see.

You call it facing it. You are not facing it.

You are simply frozen with your eyes open instead of closed.

Because you have managed to formulate all manner of explanations for how the spider came to be, for how it is impacting you, why it looks as it does, and perhaps even explaining the spider's generational history.

That is all well and good. Until you have become so stuck that your life has become about watching the spider. Therapy risks turning into a socially condoned and sophisticated form of staring.

In my mind, I imagine some good therapy as embarking on an exploration. One that first starts with the spider — so that we know what we are looking at. But then perhaps it moves to what it is like to watch the spider. What the room we watch the spider in is like. What has been forgotten while watching the spider. And so on, until a world is built. And then the question — given that we know the spider, and given the world we are in, how do we want to go on living? Are there other spiders? Other rooms, other directions?

Therapy, a Gymnasium of the Spirit?

Psychotherapy, in Nietzschean terms, should only be the gymnasium of the spirit and should not make the mistake of taking its inspiration from medicine. Emmy van Deurzen, Everyday Mysteries

Given this, perhaps one way forward — and psychotherapy as one avenue for it — is to first practise examining the spider, if it has not yet been examined. But once examined, to practise the courageous and difficult act of turning your head away from the spider and looking elsewhere.

We have built a whole wellness industry on the concept of self-examination, to the point of scrutinising and interpreting our lives away. Interpreting our lives away in some poor attempt to gain understanding, and a little certainty, for why I am the way I am. And Nietzsche warned against this:

My greatest danger always lay in indulgence and sufferance; and all humankind wants to be indulged and suffered…

As much as we need to understand ourselves and our lives, it becomes perhaps too easy to trip down into the well of wallowing — in our regrets and misfortunes, in continuously condemning our past mistakes instead of moving toward future victory. I take issue with the very sentence I have just written, because it can be misread, and comes across too easily as something that is easy to do. It is not.

But wallowing — staring at the spider — has seemed to become conflated with healing. In my view, it is not that either.

Courage

Perhaps it is insufficient to dig into the past, to detail with forensic precision every crevice, stripe, and dot on the spider. Perhaps we need to start to evaluate how we look at the spider — and how we do not look at the world. And whether we can accept that in stepping into the world, we may lose sight of the spider. And choose anyway to live in a world in which spiders exist.

If you, like me, prefer to know where the spiders in your house are placed, then perhaps, like me, you hate looking away only to find them gone. Disappeared. It can seem better to watch them always, to know where they are. But what kind of a life is spent watching the bedroom spider? Perhaps there is some sense in befriending it — if not as friends, then as tolerance, and perhaps acceptance. Because the past is what it is, just as the uncatchable spider is what it is, and there is not much to be done with either. And all of that takes courage.

Although we need to look deeply into our suffering, we need most of all to overcome it.  Emmy van Deurzen, Everyday Mysteries

Perhaps, just maybe, it is not only about understanding. Because yes, understanding is necessary and all well and good. But then what? What now?

Given that we are to live in a world with spiders, perhaps the question is about how we will go about living in a world with spiders.

May we not mistake a frozen gaze, inflexible introspection, for courage.