Searching for the Unconditional: Life as a Journey
Dr. Virginia Rockhill is a psychologist practicing in Colebrook, NH. Dr. Rockhill specializes in the treatment of mental health problems, and helps people to cope with their mental illnesses. As a psychologist, Dr. Rockhill evaluates and treats patients through a variety of methods, most typically being psychotherapy or... more
Searching for the Unconditional: Life as a Journey
From birth to death, we have many kinds of life experiences. As the song “The Bug” by Mary Chapin Carpenter goes:
“Well it’s a strange old game you learn it slow
One step forward and it’s back you go
You’re standing on the throttle
You’re standing on the brake
In the groove ’til you make a mistake.
Sometimes you’re the windshield, Sometimes you’re the bug….”
We all are searching for a universal something that is always there that we can depend upon, the perfectly reliable and trustworthy, the absolute Truth. Interestingly however, there is more relativism in our world today than ever, which is philosophically opposed to an Absolute. So how does this affect our journey through life? The process of reconciling our expectations (thoughts) with our emotional responses can be incongruent, resulting in an impaired ability to accept the ups and downs that are inevitable in life. How do we find the Absolute?
“You gotta know happy - you gotta know glad
Because you’re gonna know lonely
And you’re gonna know sad…”
If we think of our lives as being one of those 19th century clipper ships and our minds being the “captain” of the ship, our job is to plan our voyages efficiently and safely if we want our journey to arrive where we are supposed to. That is, to be sure we are well-provisioned, we study our charts and weather patterns, etc. But sometimes, even the best planned voyages can have some catastrophes: hurricanes, torn sails, etc. We can end up very far from our intended voyage, not through any fault of ours, and then must decide how and what we need to do to “get back on course”. Dealing with the failure (thoughts) and the anxiety of not being able to trust ourselves to be safe and secure creates doubts about our purpose in life. Maybe we shouldn’t try another voyage, maybe we are not a very good “captain” of our ship. The problem is, what are we going to do with our life, which is the “ship”? Just thinking relativistically wouldn’t help us out of our immobilized state, as the natural world operates in absolutes. Sometimes it helps to reflect back at how we view the world around us, are we being too subjective, is there more we need to learn to be a better “captain” of our ship? Do we need to spend some time examining our biases and assumptions about the world we are in contact with each day?
“He lay on his back, relaxed, with his little legs crossed resting on his arms. ‘Did you ever wonder how it is that we can talk to one another, you know, because you’re a dog and I’m a toad? I’ve never talked to any other dogs’, he said. ‘Now that you mention it, I’ve never talked to any other toads’, she giggled. “I can understand most of what my mom says to me because of how her voice sounds and how how she looks at me with love in her eyes. I know a lot of what actual words mean. With other humans, it’s not easy to understand what they say. I get nervous around humans I don’t know well’, she said. ‘I always get nervous with anything that is bigger than me, which is most things’, the toad said. He surprised himself at being so honest about his feelings with her, realizing that his life was changing as they spoke. He thought about the other times when he felt some power or force that gave him a new way of looking at things and motivated him to try to improve the way he lived’. ” From Unconditional: Encounters with Unexpected New Friends, by Virginia Rockhill, Ph.D.
