To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we’d like to render as comfortable, as interesting, and as kind as possible.
A philosophy of consolation directs us to two important salves: understanding and companionship. Or grasping what our problem is, and knowing that we are not alone with it. Understanding does not magically remove the pain, but it has the power to reduce a range of secondary aggravations and fears. At least we know what is racking us and why. Our worst fears are held in check, and tears may be turned into bitter knowledge.
It helps immensely too to know that we are in company. Despite the upbeat tone of society in general, there is solace in the discovery that everyone else is, in private, of course as bewildered and regretful as we are. This is not Schadenfreude, simply profound relief that we are not the only ones.
SANE INSANITY
Basic sanity should also be assumed to be beyond us. There are too many powerful reasons why we lack anything like an even keel. We have complex histories, we are heading toward the ultimate catastrophe, we are vulnerable to devastating losses, love will always leave us wanting, the gap between our hopes and our realities is always going to be unbridgeable. In the circumstances, it makes no sense to aim for sanity; we should fix instead on the goal of achieving a wise, knowledgeable, and self-possessed relationship with our manifold insanities, or what can be termed “sane insanity.” What separates the sane insane from the simply insane is the honest, personable, and accurate grasp they have on what is not entirely right with them. They may not be wholly balanced, but they don’t have the additional folly of insisting on their normalcy. They can admit with good grace, and no particular loss of dignity, that they are naturally deeply peculiar at myriad points. They do not go out of their way to hide from us what they get up to in the night, in their sad moments, when anxiety strikes, or during attacks of envy. They can—at their best—be drily funny about the tragedy of being human. They lay bare the fears, doubts, longings, desires, and habits that don’t belong to the story we commonly tell ourselves about who we are.
The sane insane among us are not a special category of the mentally unwell; they represent the most evolved possibility for a mature human being.
- Alain De Botton