Between the ditches

When I was a pre-teen, I suffered from terrible depression without even realizing what it was. When I was a teenager, I romantically lumped it in with binge drinking and suicidal thoughts and the first glorious bursts of the wild creativity that would ultimately lead me to discover that I was an artist.

In university I swung wildly, but had the flexible schedule that allowed me to sleep in, at least. It wasn't until I built my cabin in Nova Scotia that my inability to deal with depression really caught up. As the circumstances of my manic impulses piled on, they began to tower over me, and ultimately to crush me. The result: a broken marriage, the long highway between my daughter and me, a hesitant and painful fresh start in Toronto, five years without a solo gig...

And all the beauty that I've seen and enjoyed and been given and built since then. My day job at Discovery didn't prevent depression, but it tempered it: I'm too much a victim of the Protestant work ethic to miss work because I feel poorly, and the rhythm of having to get up and shave and smile every day helped me in a lot of ways.

I'm back out on my own now, and who should come along but my old friend the blues... and of course every time you sink below the line, you access every painful moment you ever had and feel like that's all there is.

This time it's different though. I've been as bad a Buddhist practitioner as I was a Christian believer, but one thing that's never left me since I learned it on a ten-day silent mediation retreat back in 1997 is the observing mind. This little tool or trick does wonders: as long as you're maintaining your awareness, you can careen madly all over the map and with a little effort, snap back to the line.

That's what they mean up in Parry Sound, I guess, when they say "keep 'er between the ditches." And I do.