Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Matthew 11:28
When you’re weary, feeling small,
When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all;
I’m on your side. When times get rough
And friends just can’t be found,
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.
Paul Simon, Bridge Over Troubled Waters
Eventually we grow weary of seeking treasures outside ourselves and we begin to look within. There we discover that the gold we sought, we already are.
Alan Cohen
The field of quantum possibility, in which love has opened doors otherwise unimaginable, is our soul’s true habitat. The world of fear and limitation is not our home, and who among us is not profoundly weary of hanging out where we do not belong.
Marianne Williamson
1970 was a big year for Simon and Garfunkel. Having risen to international stardom since their first album in 1964, `Bridge Over Troubled Waters´ was released as their fifth and final album in 1970. It was the best-selling album in 1970, 1971 and 1972 and was, by December 1972, the best-selling album in history.
My passion for music has always been part of me, fuelled by the fact that I am the fifth child in a family of twelve. So, although only nine years old in 1970, I had the advantage of my older siblings having already bought a number of records by that time, records which were played non-stop each day, until my father came home from work scolding: `Turn off that noise!´
An intense culture war had broken out by that time, the family ramifications of which have only recently become clear to me while contemplating my childhood years.
The one side was represented by my parents, father and mother born in 1926 and 1930, respectively. They had grown up in the very insular new Irish Free State where the leaders saw themselves as the sentinels of the old moral Catholic order of late medieval Europe in the face of the imminent threat of the morally deficient superficiality of a new age, prominently represented by rock’n’roll.
Among those first few LPs were: `Bridge Over Troubled Waters´, `Sgt. Pepper´s Lonely Hearts Club Band´ and the timeless `Songs of Leonard Cohen´.
My older brothers were 17 and 16, while my two older sisters were 14 and 12. The three older siblings formed a triumvirate, who, by simply embracing the new culture which was unfolding all around them, were pushing the boundaries of what my father, specifically, would have found acceptable. Tastes in clothing, music, and politics, as well as attitudes towards morality were radically shifting.
My older siblings were the vanguard of the new dawn, a role which led to considerable tension between them and my parents. The older generation would have preferred to remain in the Irish Catholic orthodoxy of moral rigidity, no sex before marriage, no contraception, not even to mention divorce, the doctrine of coverture which treated a married woman as legally non-existent, with her legal rights and property merging with her husband’s, and life as portrayed in the immaculate, censured, innocent roles played by Doris Day, Grace Kelly, and Gregory Peck filling our screens (available for a only a few hours of TV per day and the odd visit to the cinema).
The new Zeitgeist was primarily concerned with breaking out of the constricting conventions of the past. Pupils were sent home from high school for refusing to have their hair cropped in the JFK style and female pupils were pilloried for smoking cigarettes in public spaces.
In the middle of all of this, caught between these two fronts as my tenth birthday approached, was a boy who loved the new music and was overwhelmed by the intensity, pace, and the toxic emotional flavour of family life.
Ours was a household bereft of a language to deal openly and constructively with feelings. There was much slamming of doors, rolling of eyes, and muttering under the breath, so much so that the air felt heavy with friction and passive aggression.
This was exacerbated by the incessant teasing which went on at home and beyond. As a nine-year-old, I already had four younger brothers, 6, 4, 2, and a new-born, with one more brother to arrive within the next two years.
Children are, by nature, vivacious, loud, impulsive, and sometimes even cruel. In healthy families, the parents – a bit like the referee in the boxing ring – ensure that things don’t get out of hand, that safety and a minimum of fairness prevail.
In my childhood experience, the parents as taskmasters were very present. Parents in the roles of guides, protectors, mentors, and the source of affection were scarce or sadly missing. This led to feelings of abandonment, dread, anxiety, fear, hopelessness, and shame.
A further characteristic of such families is the enormous amount of work that needs to be done, day in day out, to keep the show on the road. Washing, cooking, shopping, cleaning, caring for toddlers and infants, etc. – the list is long.
In the absence of domestic servants (as in our case) much of the responsibility for household chores fell to the children. The earlier we got engaged, the better. My capacity to perform such tasks well, even at a very early age, was perhaps my undoing. The reward for hanging out a basket of washing on the line one day was to be given two baskets the following day. And so on.
How did I manage such chores? Supposedly by observing how others succeeded or failed. With a keen ability to learn by mimicking, I quickly established myself as an over-performer in the field of household chores, despite much resentment as to why my life was so confined, controlled, and directed by others.
Without realising it, I had shifted my focus onto the needs of others, their possible reactions, and the strategy which would get me even a semblance of attention and validation. In this process my connection with my True Self, the child within, slowly got lost.
In the heat of battle, to the child with few resources and a high degree of dependency on the adults and older siblings at home, the people-pleasing false self seems like the solution to all our problems. We get used to performing for people. They, in turn, appear to be happy with us.
The people-pleasing false self is, however, a manifestation of dishonesty. We get into the habit of betraying those around us and, especially, ourselves. We begin to fall into anger, depression, and despair, fretting over controlling the uncontrollable, the actions of our false self, and the reactions of those we are trying to please.
Having by now learned to walk on eggshells, we are in a constant state of worry, trying to suppress who we are while figuring out who others want us to be.
While walking this tightrope, we invariably make mistakes, becoming more exhausted from overthinking and fretting. At times, our pent-up anger breaks through. We explode with righteous indignation.
`Don’t they know how hard I have worked, how much effort I have invested in getting things right?´ In truth, we chose to hide who we really were, our genuine identity. By believing we could manipulate others in their reactions to us, we rode roughshod over their free will and, most importantly, our own. We eventually got caught up in a prison of our own making.
Ashamed our ourselves, we sacrificed boundaries in the frantic pursuit of our goals. We became adept at holding others hostage, just as we felt imprisoned. We became enmeshed in others and lost our identities.
Who was attuned to and attended to my needs in those years leading up to and beyond 1970?
In the simmering cauldron of mistrust, presided over by overwhelmed parents, themselves weighed down by their own untreated trauma while doing their best to guide their ten children through the troubled waters of those tumultuous times, the sad answer is: `No one´.
In the neglect arising from the absence of the caregiver attuned to our needs we soon learn to take care of our own needs. We become the children who are often admired for our maturity beyond our years, a target of warm praise from our caregivers, our teachers, and later, our bosses.
We are the hyper-independent self starters everyone wants on their team because we require little or no supervision. We learn to become the compliant partner in relationships or flip to the other extreme of trying to dominate them.
By sacrificing our humanity, we ward off any disappointment by not allowing ourselves to express any needs to anyone. We believe we don’t need anything. This denial of our needs is the small price to pay to avoid the overwhelming sense of loss buried under layers of volitional self-sufficiency.
In this atmosphere of `don’t talk, don’t feel, don’t trust´ the strongest yearning was to escape. This yearning was fulfilled to a certain extent by day dreaming, by spending moments alone in nature, and in visiting the homes of schoolfriends, always reluctantly returning home much later than had been prescribed.
This deliverance from reality was later achieved by the effects of substances such as alcohol and weed, which led to a pattern of daily consumption over the subsequent decades, until I hit bottom and began the journey of recovery in my early forties.
In my adult life, I sometimes feel the pain of the absence of an older man who would lovingly and patiently meet me in my world and show me how to master new tasks and show me how to navigate the next steps, with warmth and encouragement, free of judgement or pressure.
Under ideal circumstances this role would have been fulfilled by my father, but as pointed out above, he was already preoccupied on many fronts. As the sole earner there was immense pressure to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads.
Then there was the culture war from which he appeared unable to extract himself. There may have been other factors such as his own unresolved childhood trauma and the nature of his relationship with my mother.
Whatever the causes, he was not available to provide the support I so badly needed and still yearn at times today. The fact that he died so young at the age of 51, in my seventeenth year, has probably exacerbated my feelings of neglect and loss.
These past few weeks of reflection have shown me that there have been several periods of weariness even over the past two decades since the process of recovery began.
In 2003, right at the beginning, there was almost two years of burnout until I could get back in the saddle of professional activities.
`What a weary time those years were – to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability´, as so eloquently expressed by Charles Bukowski.
Now, at another professional crossroads, that old yearning for guidance and support has re-emerged once more. This time, I will give it the time and space it needs to be transformed.
Weariness has been knocking on my door again. It has prompted me to look within, to check where untreated wounds beckon and dormant grief awaits expression, acknowledgement, and the process of letting go.
The image of the adult man, kneeling down to enter the world of the boy, to engage eye to eye, heart to heart, to enquire, to explore, and encourage him in the challenge of learning something new, of facing some adversity, of breaking new ground.
That activates the sense of weariness. I’ve been running on will power for so long. The tank is empty. Then the grief of all those losses percolates to the surface: the loss of childhood, loss of loved ones, loss of opportunities, and especially loss of self. It all comes gushing forth.
With the kind support and encouragement of friends and fellows, I let it all flow through me, like the salt water through a shrimp net being idly pulled through a tidal pool. I feel the movement, the softening of my body and the melting of my heart.
In the knowledge that further steps lie ahead, it is now time to rest. I embrace the reality that the one I had been waiting for – to guide, support, and encourage me through the troubled waters – is, in fact, the awakened, grateful, recovering doyen of the human condition that I am becoming.
