I only found peace by entering the darkness

Leah Mertz
Nov 4 · 3 min read

Just like sadness, happiness is an emotion.

Well, emotions don’t last. The laughter stops. The tears eventually dry.

The half-life on experiencing an emotion is pretty short if one thinks about how long they can actually laugh, or how long they can actually cry. Two hours would be pushing it.

Peace, on the other hand, is a state of being. It can be maintained and sustained.

But there are dark, sinister forces standing between you and peace at all times:

Truth and failure.

Let me explain

Think of darkness as a hole. The more hard truths and failure you experience, the larger the hole gets. In many cases, the darkness seems suffocating and without end. It’s relentless, serious stuff.

BUT, if you find yourself in this massive hole of darkness, you get the gift of even the smallest light making a profound indentation.

For example, shine a flashlight in a lit room and you won’t see it. Shine a flashlight in a dark room? Its luminance will be vivid and expand to every corner.

The light will mean something. It will take form. Even the smallest shred of light will register as overwhelmingly gratuitous. And this, this right here, is the magical point where the ‘little things’ can genuinely be appreciated.

(We’ve all been told to appreciate the little things, right?)

Having a warm bed to sleep in is a gratitude you cannot describe. Enjoying an uninterrupted hot cup of coffee can make you feel thankful to be alive. Sharing a hearty laugh with your partner makes it feel like the galaxies somehow perfectly aligned to bring you together.

Protecting yourself is harming yourself

If you deliberately protect yourself from failure and pain, your bar for appreciating joyous moments in life will be set too high.

Little things won’t mean anything to you. Only the ‘big’ socially engineered ones will: Going on vacation once a year, seeing your child get married, becoming a homeowner, watching your sports team win, etc.

Sadly, a life that’s potentially made up of a million joyous moments won’t register — you’ll ignore them because they can’t compete with the ‘big ones’. The ‘happy ones’.

Basically, the ones that don’t let darkness exist. Or rather, the ones that pretend darkness doesn’t exist.

And if you constantly try to avoid darkness entirely, congrats — you’ve confined yourself to a superficial mission of solely chasing ‘happiness’.

Well, happiness is simply an emotion with a very short half-life. It’s fleeting and will always evaporate.

So, seek happiness and you tread in dangerous waters of vice and addiction taking over.

Seek happiness and you risk being pounded into the pavement with depression when life turns ugly. Because life, to you, is inherently ‘wrong’ when it’s dark. So, you avoided darkness instead of facing it. How did that work out for you?

You stayed in the wrong relationship. You never moved away. You never cut ties with a bad friend. You never tried something new. You avoided a counter-opinion. You stayed in a job you hate. You didn’t face your childhood trauma. You told lies.

Accept that these things need your attention. Go explore them. Go fail at figuring them out. Try again. Darkness is just as ‘right’ as joyous times are. They both have their place and give each other profound context.

Moving forward

My song ‘Wind’ is about surrendering to the darkness. It’s about accepting the cold truth, experiencing failure, and challenging everything you know and thought you were.

But, the second half is about feeling an enormous sense of peace and purpose in deciding to trek through it.

Oddly enough, I wrote it in 2012 before I had really experienced anything of what the song talks about. Maybe it was a premonition? It remained unfinished for 7 years until this September. The video chronicles first working on it in Vancouver (2012–2015), our time in Montreal (2015–2019), and dancing by the river as a new resident of Saskatoon (2019).

So, dear darkness, as it says in the song repeatedly: ‘My life is in your hands’.

It always will be.

Leah Mertz — Wind (2019)
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