The Weight of the World
Discover more from The Feelings Union with Lisa M. O'Neill
The Weight of the World
Bearing this gravity together
You wanna take it off
It’s the weight of the world
You want to set it free
Just for today
Can’t always be the one
To heal everything
And the weight of the world
Was never yours to keep
–Dar Williams, “Weight of the World”
(excerpted throughout this piece in italics)
In the middle of the middle of the pandemic, I needed to learn how to play a song. This happens to me sometimes. A surge comes through me and I need to learn a particular song or read a particular poem or find a particular piece of art. When this impulse takes the shape of a song, I need to learn to play it immediately–not for any practical reason. I need to metabolize something. Through strumming the chords on my guitar and singing, I’m able to feel something that needs to be felt and release something that needs letting go. Only through playing the song, through getting the song in my body: my lungs, my vocal cords, my mouth, my hands, a subtle–and sometimes not so subtle–shift is possible.
At that moment, the song I needed to learn to play was “Weight of the World'' by Dar Williams. Years before, when I first heard the song, it resonated to my core, and I still cannot listen without crying. Tears, a product of feeling seen. Tears, a portal to letting go. Because the song speaks to everything we are carrying.
To be alive is to constantly confront suffering. I know that every human being who has ever human beinged has felt like their time was the hardest time, and history certainly has no scarcity of pain, injustice, violence, or heartbreak. I think the difference nowadays is that we are AWARE in ways that were impossible before. On the cacophony of screens in front of us are shuffling stories and images of the pain of others, the collapse of our ecosystems, the fascist removal of rights and public safety, the multiplying threats to our future. Pain, pulsing in the background. Pain, both inside us and beyond our reach.
We feel a weight none of us could possibly bear alone. But often we do feel as if we are alone, siloed in our own bedrooms looking at our own screens. We know that the human brain, as a survival instinct, holds onto perceived threats. And the threats are everywhere.
I have always struggled with anxiety. From the time I was a child, I could easily read the body language of everyone in the room and get a handle on the emotional experiences happening in the space. Permeable, I didn’t always understand the perimeter of my own person and which feelings belonged to me rather than others. I remember spending much of my waking time worrying. In Dar’s book Writing a Song That Matters, she writes about struggling with insomnia as a child and coming up with word games to pass the time. I had never thought about my childhood terrors through the lens of insomnia but that is exactly what happened. At bedtime, my head would start spinning. I worried about my parents, my family, my friends, the war in the Middle East, children my age who were homeless, any snippet of any thing that I had heard that communicated the pain of others. I couldn’t hold it all. I didn’t know how to be alive and contend with all that I knew.
And, in comparison to today’s young people, I knew so little.
I’ve been seeing so many stories about how American teenagers are struggling with their mental health these days. How could they not? Besides the aforementioned state of always being aware of so many sources of suffering in the world, their lives were bifurcated by the isolation of lockdown and the continuing pandemic. They are navigating the arduous task of becoming. They are learning how to navigate relationships and connections and how to understand and honor who they are. And at the same time, they see the stories about the climate crisis and the looming collapse of life as we know it.
In my experience, teenagers are the most astute, aware, and brilliant people among us. They are old enough to understand how the world works. And they are young enough to want something way different than what they’ve been handed. They are old enough to witness adults who have compromised their values. And they are young enough to not be talked out of their passionate knowings. They are our truth-tellers. And as they stand on the bridge between childhood and adulthood, their minds sharp and imaginations expansive, they see clearly.
In my mind, they aren’t struggling because they are on their phones too much, a reductive finding of many of these articles. They are struggling because our webs of connection are limited. It is easy to feel like the weight is ours alone to bear when our individual worlds are so insular. The problem isn’t connecting through our phones–the problem is that we often seek out our phones when what we need is a deeper form of connection, with ourselves and with one another.
You can spend so many days
Trying to make the darkness go away
But it’s the weight of the world
It’s the curse of the worldly ways
When I was in the seventh grade, we read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. I loved learning about the gods. I had been raised Catholic with an all-knowing and omniscient father, son, and holy spirit so there was something deeply satisfying about gods who messed up, divine beings who failed. They had these superpowers, they could alter space and time, they could carry it all, but if you, for instance, stabbed them in their heel, they would die.
Also, in these stories, women had power and purpose. Beyond immaculate conception and virgin birth. Just saying.
At the same time I was learning about Greek mythology, I was attending a Catholic grammar school named St. Christopher’s. At one of the entrances to the school, I remember an image of St. Christopher holding up what I recall as the Earth but what probably was baby Jesus as they crossed a rushing river (as the story goes). My brain conflated the two figures, and I thought of him as Atlas. Two men holding up the weight of the world with their brute strength.
In the present, I didn’t remember the details of Atlas or why he was holding up the Earth and sky. So I looked it up. Apparently, Atlas was part of a band of gods who lost a war. Most of them were banished but his punishment was to bear this weight. According to theoi.com, “Atlas did not like holding up the earth on his shoulders, and he tried to get out of it many times.” Understandable.
What I liked and like about Greek mythology is that it shows not only the enormous capacity beings have to excel but also their flaws, their limitations, and their failures. I remember my teacher saying that Greeks created these stories of their gods to understand their own lives. They knew the Earth and sky was a tremendous gravity–to hold it alone, an unimaginable burden.
Can’t keep it inside
So go on just let it out
It’s the weight of the world
If you ever had a doubt
I’ve spent many years trying to reckon with suffering. Not just mine but the suffering we must all face by nature of being alive. In 2013, I took the Buddhist precepts. I have a meditation practice, and I sit weekly with a meditation community, called a sangha. And it matters. It matters that I have shown up and learned to be with my feelings. I have a bigger container than I used to when the avalanche of emotions arises.
And yet. And yet. I continue to learn that being present to this experience of being human isn't a matter of arrival. We are always arriving. In a perpetual state of leaving and then coming home.
You wanna take it off
‘Cause it makes your body hurt
It’s the weight of the world
It was never really yours
So I learned this song. I sang it. I sing it. Because I need to remind myself that the weight of the world is heavy and not only mine to bear. I need to remind myself that we can carry it in parcels. I need to remind myself that, even when it feels like it, I am not holding all this grief and pain alone.
There is a Buddhist practice called tonglen. Most often, Buddhist teachers suggest practitioners do tonglen when they are already immersed in their own suffering. During the practice, you connect with the people in the world who, like you, are suffering. Many teachers talk about connecting with people who are suffering with pain in the precise shape of yours. With shame, with anxiety, with illness, with the death of a loved one, with heartbreak from the ending of a relationship, with the feeling of loneliness, with the fear you will never recover. You hold space, you imagine all those out there suffering, and you breathe in the suffering of all those enduring that shared pain. Some teachers ask you to conjure the imagery of breathing in opaque smoke. Then, you breathe out relief.
The first time I did tonglen on my own, I was overcome. I have always had a vivid imagination. And I could see clearly the dark cloud of pain and suffering. I could imagine pulling it into my body, my lungs filling with that toxic air. When I breathed it in, I choked.
But I realized something I missed that first go round.
The point isn’t only to connect with others to relieve their pain, it is also to relieve your own. The point isn’t to martyr yourself for the ease of others. It is to recognize that we are in this together and that, when we breathe together, when we work together, when we carry the weight together, we can find succor and sustenance.
When you breathe out relief, you are among those who receive it. We forget. We so often forget that we, too, are worthy of a helping hand.
Can’t keep it inside
Oh, you know you gotta set it free
‘Cause the weight of the world
Was never yours to keep
This last line always gets me. We are not Atlas. We are not forever punished, doomed to hold upon our shoulders the Earth and sky. All kinds of images congregate here to remind me. The passing of a baton from one runner to another. The alternating breaths of a chorus in song. And this one–from the recesses of my grade school memory–the feeling of running under a rainbow-striped parachute. Remember? We didn’t have to worry about the fabric dome staying afloat because we were taking turns. After I ran under, I replaced you at your spot and it was your turn to run free. Together, we kept that dome of color and texture and light aloft.
Notes & News
In February and March 2024, I will be teaching my nonfiction course Writing the Where: Storying the Places that Shape Us through Corporeal Writing. Information below. Follow the link to find out more and to register.
Four Tuesdays over ZOOM, from 5pm-7pm Pacific
(February 27th, March 5th, March 12th, March 19th, 2024)
In this four-week nonfiction writing workshop, we will delve into writing about place. Together, we will read and discuss examples of how other writers build place as character, how they orient readers to a perhaps unknown, unfamiliar landscape. We will think about the aspects that make up a place: locale, landscape, people, culture, history, and values. We will consider our own positionality: how to use our unique connections to a place as fodder for our stories and how to write responsibly about places we cannot fully claim as our own. We will write into the questions we have about the places that have shaped us, the places we love and loathe in equal measure, the places that perplex us, the places we desire to know better, the places at the margins, the places that have changed over time, the places that have changed us at our core, the places that now exist only in our imaginations. Our class will be a homestead for curiosity, discourse, and experimentation. Inside and outside of class, we will write about place and develop a portfolio of ideas to plumb in future writing.