There is nothing wrong with falling apart. I think it’s important to define what this means, however, and I will seek to do so in a couple ways. First, falling apart I think is a felt experience. It is that something ends you were trying to hold up: a job, a marriage, a friendship, a way of seeing yourself, someone from dying. Our gut is a significant location in the body for knowing something is not stable. This is why we develop digestive issues when we are under a lot of stress. Second, falling apart is a positive experience of growth. Most of the time we only see it as the first. Don’t get me wrong, it takes a great deal of courage and willpower to see it as anything but a terrible loss. But snakes shed their skin, trees bloom again in the spring, and sometimes people have to say something terrible to know they never want to say it again. Falling apart is painful, but a necessary piece of the human condition.
It is more helpful, even, to look at falling apart as a part of the growth process. It is our life giving us helpful information. What works? What doesn’t? What do we need to look at in ourselves we keep turning a blind eye towards? If we pan backwards and see that we collapse and rebuild many times in our life, maybe it’s not that bad anymore. Maybe we see there are important feelings that go with it, but they are still just transient. They pass just like the earth rotates and the sun appears again.
It takes an attitude of warriorship to see life this way. To have a welcoming to our discomfort, our lack of control, our pain. Our not knowing. That’s how things really are. Nobody can say, “this will happen tomorrow.” Not for sure. The best laid plans are allowed to go south. Go to any wedding and you know this is true.
This doesn’t mean that we wallow or create suffering on purpose. That would be ridiculous and unnecessary. But when we eat, we get full. When we are lonely and have company, we get comforted. When we desire a new job and get hired, we are satisfied. But there is always a moment after. Sometimes that is the falling apart. Not knowing what to do once you have the thing you want. So we find something else to grab. And many people are skilled at living life this way. But they also have a kind of impatience to them. You can see they are agitated and unrested. If you really got to know them you’d see they feel kind of crazy.
Perhaps there are many answers to this dilemma of what to do with falling apart. I think one of them is to see its nature. See how it comes and goes, how it can be a good teacher, and take an attitude of humility and gratitude towards it. I think that is challenging. But I also think those are the happiest people. They make room for both.