When You Find Yourself In A Pit

It’s dark. You can’t see more than two inches in front of your face. The mystery could be financial, vocational — a crossroads in life, love, or pursuit of happiness. The sensation is the same, no matter the circumstance.

This is life in the pit of despair, of depression.

If you’ve ever been spelunking, wandering through a cave on a guided tour, there comes a point underground in which you find yourself in absolute darkness. It’s usually reached with a warning, the guide inviting the journeyers to extinguish their lights for a moment, a carefully curated experience of darkness in which someone always has complete or near-complete control. At first, the darkness is thrilling — a sensory deprivation adventure! But as the sounds and smells heighten at the loss of sight, one begins to feel the coolness of the cave, one wonders if you remember what light looks like, feels like — if you also will turn into one of those blind cave-bugs that over millennia has decided that eyes weren’t an organ worth bothering with if the light of day was never going to shine.

Plenty of metaphors exist for light and darkness — for ways we find ourselves crossways and upside down on reality. But what do we do when we identify that familiar, terrifying sensation of dark?

We keep going.