"I just can't take it anymore!"
When you feel enveloped in a deep, dark pit of despair, when your heart feels shredded into a thousand pieces, when you just can't contend with the painful challenges for even another moment...
You just might not have to. You next moment may be entirely different than your current one.
The philosopher Kierkegaard, who sowed the roots of existential psychology, eloquently wrote, "A self, every instant it exists is in the process of becoming, for the self… is only that which it is to become."
And yet, the source of much of our misery is that we view our lives in a limited way, as a snapshot, believing that what we hold now represents how we always were and will be.
But everything in our world remains in a state of flux. At every moment there is enormous change. The shift may occur so slightly as to be imperceptible to our eyes and minds, but it is taking place.
Change is ceaseless. A vase or a piece of furniture changes every single moment even if it looks permanent. It discolours and becomes antique, not all of a sudden, but moment by moment.
This is true of inanimate objects, and applies even more to physical, psychological and spiritual dynamics.
The typical cell in our body dies after 100 days or so. Every second, 2.5 million red blood cells are born, and in the same second a corresponding amount die. This cycle of birth and death occurs constantly.
In the words of Rollo May, "Personality can be understood only as we see it on a trajectory, toward its future; a man can understand himself only as he projects himself forward. This is a corollary of the fact that the person is always becoming, always emerging, into the future. The self is to be seen in its potentiality."
Some challenges don't come and go, but continue to afflict us throughout our lives. Yet, even then, a new set of circumstances is constantly being conceived and formed, creating the process of change.
William James writes, "The grass out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown, another part bright yellow to give its real sensational effect. We take no heed, as a rule of the different way in which the same things look and sound and smell at different distances and under different circumstances.
"The same object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again...Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, and apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. "
In one of the most moving accounts of hope emerging from within overwhelming darkness, the Torah records the first interchange between G‑d and Moses.
The Jewish people had been experiencing the severest degradation under the tyranny of their Egyptian oppressors. G‑d commands Moses to reveal that He will be freeing them from bondage. Moses responds by asking what he should say is G‑d's name.
Moses was requesting a message of solace and hope to bring to a broken people whose G‑d had seemingly abandoned them during the last many decades by turning a deaf ear to their anguished wails.
G‑d responds elusively. Moses should convey to the Hebrew slaves that G‑d's name is "I will be what I will be."
For a time, the slavery became worse after Moses' message of hope. Though the seeds of redemption were sown, from the people's perspective, nothing had changed. And yet, the situation was dramatically evolving.
Perhaps G‑d's message to the downtrodden people, is G‑d's message to us in our moments of misery, that we can connect to divinity with "I will be what I will be"— the power to be.
Only when we are able to realize that being is inseparable from becoming, can we free ourselves from the shackles of servitude to our anxieties and self-defeating habits.
The present is only what we have brought from our pasts, and what we will use to forge into our immediate futures. Bringing this truth into our consciousness can help us find solace as we encounter the hardships in the present tense of our lives.
So when the blackness seems overpowering, when the tedious monotony is driving you to the brink of insanity, take comfort in the realization that nothing in our world remains static.
Not our present challenges. Nor who we are.
You, your life and circumstances are an integral part of the labyrinth of G‑d's cosmic plan, emerging anew every instance.
There is no static "is." There is only what we were—and most importantly, what we choose to become.
