Discipline and Despair
As parents, resisting a culture of despair in the face of the challenges we all grapple with.
“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost” - Thomas Merton
I was laying on my son’s bed tonight, as part of a settling routine that entails some stillness and silence that benefits us both. We listened to the rain cascading above us in a kind of beautiful, imperfect syncopation that changes the way you breathe and the way you think, if only for a moment. It struck me that I was at peace, satisfied, in a manner that threw off the disgruntled, ambitious appetites and aspirations that will often plague moments of reflection and introspection. I felt blissfully satisfied with the state of things as they were, despite the broken sleep ahead, the work that I was putting off, the troubling and challenging dispositions that tended to resurface in our beloved children from time to time.
I was at peace, satisfied, in a manner that had no immediate cause or correlation with that given moment, but was more easily attributable to a discipline of disposition. One that is perhaps the greatest blessing to come from our eleven years of marriage and nine years of parenting together. Things are by no means easy, convenient or exceedingly comfortable in our lives, they haven’t been for some time. But we’ve learnt, through trial and error more than anything, to find grace and solace in the simplest of blessings. We’ve learnt, through sheer necessity, to take refuge and recuperation in scant moments of peace and prayer.
Ultimately, cultivating a discipline of gratitude and sense of joyous abandonment is a skill, as much as anything. We are all surrounded by the pervasive moods of those we know, we love; those we live with, work with and wrangle with every day. The attitudes of those we’re surrounded by inform us, in a sense, with norms, with states that aren’t altogether ours, but can certainly become so. When we’re surrounded by a sense of anger, or despair, it’s incredibly simple, an in some sick way, it’s gratifying. There’s a bizarre satisfaction, a distorted sense of community that comes with aligning yourself with the malaise and melancholy that surrounds you.
But as a parent, as an artist, it is a death sentence. I know when I’ve carried home the morose dissatisfaction of my workplace. I know the effect that it has on my children, my marriage, my own desire and disposition to create, to learn, to grow. When I become trapped in a fugue state of anger or frustration, that simmers away without purposeful action, decision and determination, I’m lost, dead, to the space, silence and sensibility that can grapple with both the beauty and the complexity of the people and the events I’m surrounded by. The world becomes meaningless, drab, askew in a manner that draws the life and love from it all.
And it’s so easy, obscenely simple, as a parent, to be drawn into that kind of despair. The gravity of the labour, the demands on your presence and patience are without parallel. The challenges to your very sense of stability, efficacy and intelligence come thick and fast. Furthermore, they come with the seemingly poisonous inanity of something as futile as breakfast options, or the wrong t-shirt being in the wash. It’s not often discussed without parody, but parenting is an incredibly demanding, exhausting (yet equally gratifying) vocation. It can be isolating and obsessive, driving you to doubt and question every misstep you never made.
But the art of it comes down to a discipline of disposition, that resists the lure of despair. It comes down to counting your blessings, in amongst the toil, the muck, the manic inconsistency of one minute to the next. It comes down to a choice, to model grit, hope and humour to your beloved little ones, rather than initiating them into the ranks of the bitter and broken. It comes down to throwing yourself into the trenches, your wife by your side, with both of you giving all you’ve got; rather than trying to fight it off from a distance - Any kind of distance.
It comes down to understanding that the way your children will relate to adversity, to difficulty, is largely informed by how you teach them to relate to it, how you show them to grapple with it - in either a spirit of romantic efficacy, or defeated despair.