Letting the room get dark

I’m not sure if dogs experience darkness and light the way humans do. We experience the sun, the brightness of it and the heat of it. Feel it on our skin. I know that you can feel the sun because you would strategically lay where the sun was shining, so you must have some internal intelligence that guides you to the light.

As humans, we like to manipulate nature in any way we can, exerting control in order to make ourselves feel safe and comfortable. Animals don’t do that. When you were home alone on the couch and the sun set and the light coming through the windows slowly faded from bright soft yellow to deeper orange, to steely blue, to gray, to black, you just stayed in your spot (I assume, since you were home alone when this happened I can’t be entirely sure) and let the darkness happen. Sure, you didn’t have thumbs so switching on the lights may have been difficult, but still.

We don’t do that. I’m sitting in my living room on a Sunday evening. It’s 8:43pm and the sun is setting. As soon as the room began to get a little dim, my first instinct was to walk over to my lamp and switch it on. But then I stopped myself. I didn’t move my body to get off the couch. I just stayed still and decided to let the sun go down. To let the room get dark. And it was wildly uncomfortable. It’s still uncomfortable. The sun isn’t down, there is still a soft gray light coming through my windows and I am fighting with every breath not to get up and turn on a light.

Sitting in the dark is hard. Anything could be there with you. Things you might never guess could pop out and scare you and you would have no warning, you’re not able to prepare for it when it’s dark. Our lives are lived in the light — at least artificially so. We don’t want to sit in dark rooms or feel dark feelings. We want to light them up with candles, then gas lamps, then incandescent bulbs. For dark feelings we want to light them up with alcohol, drugs, laughter, more drugs, movies, TV shows, books — anything to escape the darkness.

But what if we just let the room get dark around us. What if we didn’t intervene in the natural order of things. The darkness only lasts for so long before the sunrise interrupts and shifts it down along the earth to the other side of the world. The same is true of our dark feelings. If we let them visit us they will eventually leave. If we put away the distractions and stop turning on the lights, we might just become more whole.