Brain Food #712
Breaking through the clouds
Thoughts of the day
Essayist Tim Kreider once had a unique near-death experience, when he was stabbed in the throat by a stiletto while on a holiday in Greece. He went through a period of gratitude for being alive, which he plainly described as: “I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.”
Soon, he found himself defaulting back to his normal, human condition, his baseline level of happiness, “yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night worrying about what was to become of me.” And yet, he says that once a year, on what he has hilariously dubbed his ‘stabbiversary’, he tries to remind himself that what he is living today is “a bonus life, a round on the house.”
This struggle between not letting the seemingly insignificant things bother us and appreciating the fact of being alive is all too human, and can be an issue when, as Kreider puts it, “your own emotional thermostat is set so low it makes you want to phone up the landlord and yell at him.”
He likens his experience of gratitude for having an extra life to flying on a plane and breaking through the clouds for the first time. Novel, beautiful, and even sublime experiences can contain the magic of being, though it may be terrifying at times. Life, Kreider argues, is about remembering that breaking through the clouds is possible, that even though we tend to place much more weight on our negative feelings and thoughts, we have the capacity within us to feel both sides with equal magnitude and, as Mary Oliver so simply put it, to give in to joy.
Like Plato’s philosopher in the allegory of the cave, breaking through the clouds can be a moment of blinding illumination, when we finally stop mistaking the shadows on the wall for the truth. Eventually, we will land back in reality, but we can still maintain that moment as a north star, a reminder that there is more to it than we think.
“I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d feel after getting clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of reality, being jolted out of a lifelong stupor. It’s like the revelation I had the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.”
— From Tim Kreider’s essay Reprieve
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