These days when I feel really shit I go to the beach. Obviously I wasn't always able to do that cuz I didn't always live near the beach. But going to the beach makes me feel - not necessarily better, but it makes me feel something. It helps me put things in perspective.
Tonight I will try to explain what exactly the beach does to me. I will probably be very crap at this.
It's something that by the time I return to my PC has been diluted already. You can't recreate the feeling. You have to experience it - but just going to the beach won't make you experience it. You have to be in the right mindset I guess. Feeling really really down probably helps because you're desperate to find something of importance outside yourself. Something to hold on to.
It goes something like this:
You look at the sea and you realize that same sea will still be there in millions of years. I'd say billions but by that time probably the land masses will have moved and the Channel will have disappeared... what do I know. But anyway in relation to that big sea, I am nothing.
That does not make my feelings any less relevant to me - this is all I have so of course it will matter. And the music I listen to matters. And the people starving matter. And the poor mother who loses her son in the war matters. And injustice and capital punishment matter. Going back many hundreds of years... the Inquisition mattered. The Roman Empire mattered. It's all important to us, of course it is.
But really it isn't. I look at the sea and that's what I feel. Nothing any of us humans have ever achieved is of any relevance whatsoever to the planet we live on. We're a bat of an eyelid really, nothing more. And that makes me feel a little less depressed.
It also makes me feel sorta grateful that I'm allowed to even lie on that beach. I know that sounds pathetic. But it's great - just seeing the sea & realizing it was there millions of years ago, before there were any humans or even any mammals, and it will be there millions of years from now. I love that feeling - looking at something that will survive us all.
Hm as I said, you can't put it into words. 