绝望之药 | 双语分享
绝望之药 | 双语分享
4分钟
THE MEDICINE OF DESPAIR
翻译：钱维德
I often get excited when someone reports uncaused and seemingly inexplicable sadness. I see sadness, like all the other waves in the ocean of life, as an invitation, an invocation, a calling to open up to deeper truths about existence, to recognize our inherent vastness.
我常在有人呈现一份没来由的悲伤的时候觉得心喜。我看到悲伤，就像看到生命海洋里的一个小波浪。那是一份邀约、一个祈请、一个召唤对于存在更深的真实的敞开，以明白我们本性的广阔。
Life is bitter-sweet. However beautiful things are right now, they will pass. Everything is impermanent and groundless. You will die, at least in this incarnation. Everyone you love will pass on. Your success many turn to failure. What you have, you may lose. Your body will cease to function in the way it does now. Nothing is certain, everything is cast into doubt. The water of relative existence slips through our fingers so easily. Our joy is tinged with sadness. Our joy is tinged with sadness. Our bliss is pierced with nostalgia. The yin and the yang of things won’t let you settle on an independent opposite. There is no home for the homeless here.
生命有甘有苦。不论现在有多幸福，这也会过去，世事无常。你会死，至少在这一世。每个你爱的人也都会离去。你的成功也可能有失败的一天。你拥有的，也许会失去。你的身体也在日渐衰老。没有确定的事，一切都有存疑。世间万物都如川水轻易从指缝中流去。我们的欢笑中有淡淡的哀伤，我们的喜悦里有幽幽的哀愁。事物的阴阳交合不会让你只占据单独的一极。无家可归的那个家根本不存在。
Contacting this deeper truth of existence, encountering the raw ground of being unprotected and unprepared may initially present as melancholy and even despair, but that existential disturbance may contain unlimited riches.
碰触这存在深刻的真相，遇见这无防护无准备的处女地，可能一开始你会觉得忧郁绝望，然而这份存在带来的困扰却可能蕴含无限的丰盛。
At the point of despair, when the ground falls away from under our feet and life spins out of control (were weever ‘in’ control?), often we are medicated, or we self-medicate, with pills or sex or alcohol or even spiritual teachings. Science would like to reduce our existential predicament to the dysfunction of brain chemicals, easily remedied with a few innocent-looking pills prescribed by someone with a hard-won certificate. And perhaps those theories have some validity— through certain lenses. But there are so many other lenses. Infinite lenses. There are myriad sides to this diamond of human experience, and it would be a shame to reduce our glorious being to chemicals or neurons.
在绝望来临的时候，我们感到无依无靠、天旋地转，一切都失控了（我们可曾真正“掌控”过什么呢？）。通常是透过医疗，或是我们自创处方：药丸、性或酒精，或甚至灵性教导。科学方法想把我们生命的本质困顿简略成脑子的化学成分失调，让那些寒窗苦读的医生开几颗长相单纯的小药丸就能简单地给治疗了。或许这些方式有些道理—就某种角度来看，但角度有很多的，多到不可胜数。人类经验里如钻石一样有无数的切面，如果只把我们这么荣耀的生命简化成化学成分或神经元，那就太可惜了。
Perhaps our depression is not a sickness (though I will never argue with anyone who wants to defend that view) but a call to break out, to leg go, to lose the old structures and stories, perspectives and opinions we have been holding about ourselves and the world and rest deeply in the truth of who we really are.
或许我们的忧郁并非疾病（但如果有人想坚持是疾病我也不会跟他争辩的），而是一个召唤让我们去穿越和去放下，去松脱我们一直抓着的对自己和对世界旧的架构故事看法和意见，进而深度地放松在我们本体的真相里。
Conventional wisdom would have you turn away from melancholy rather than face it. Well-meaning friends and family and self-help gurus may want to fix you, to get you ‘back to normal’ (what the hell is normal, anyway?), to make you more ‘positive’, to cheer you up. What if ’normal’ no longer fits? What if you need to shed your half-shed skin, not climb back into it? What if sadness, and pain, and fear, and all of the waves in life’s ocean, just want to move in you, to finally express themselves creatively and not be pushed away? What if you are tired of being average?
固有的道理是躲开忧愁而非面对它，好意的朋友和家人、心灵导师也想要弄好你、把你弄回”正常状态“（正常到底是什么鬼？）、把你弄”正向“一点、弄开心一点。然而要是”正常“不再管用了呢？要是你需要的是脱下这已经脱落了的半张脸，而不是再戴回去呢？要是悲伤、痛和害怕，以及生命海洋里所有的波浪只是想进入你，最后充满创造力地呈现，而不是被推开呢？要是你再也不想平庸了呢？
What if you are not nearly as limited as you were led to believe? What if you are vest enough to hold and contain all of life’s energies, the “positive’ and the ’negative’? What if you are beyond both, an ocean of consciousness, unified, boundless and free, in which even the deepest despair has a resting place?
要是你不是被教导的那样认为你是有限的呢？要是你是广阔到能容纳所有的生命能量，包括“正向”和“负向”的呢？要是你其实是超越了这两者，你是一个意识到海洋，无边无际、自由广阔，即使是最深的忧郁都能有安身之处呢？
What if your depression was simply your infinite intelligence calling you back Home, in the only way it knew how?
要是你的忧郁只是你的无尽智慧在召唤你回家，而这是它唯一知道的方法呢？
Your melancholy may contain natural medicine.
你的忧愁或许已经蕴藏自然的药方了。
