Why restlessness can be a kind of gift, according to a spiritual director
'It's the one thing we don't want, but also maybe the one thing that we need most'
Whenever that feeling of uncertainty about the life we've created creeps in, it can be easy to try to solve it with quick fixes like getting a new haircut, ending a relationship, finding a new job, or moving to a new city. But what if those uncomfortable periods are actually an opportunity?
It may feel counter-intuitive, but Casey Tygrett says restlessness can be an invitation to consider some big human questions such as "Why am I here?" and "Where do I belong?"
"We find out your little belongings, your everyday ones — your relationships with God, self, and others — those things are going to change over time," Tygrett told Tapestry host Mary Hynes.
"But what doesn't change is that you do, at your core, belong to the 'Divine.' You belong to yourself. And you have a place of belonging with other people. And that's the gift — and it's not an easy gift to receive."
Tygrett is a spiritual director and the author of The Gift of Restlessness: A Spirituality for Unsettled Seasons.
Here is part of his conversation with Hynes.
When you've become restless in your own life, what's the feeling for you?
Mostly, for me, it's the sense that … something needs to change. And so it can be simple. My wife will tell you sometimes when I'm in those places — where I'll try to grow some facial hair, and it looks terrible — and she's like, "What are you doing? This is not you." So it goes everything from that to switching vocations or relationships. I think there's sometimes a very clear sense of it. It's deep within us and we know "I can't go back. But I can't stay here." But sometimes it's a curiosity. It says, "I don't know what to do. I don't know that it's not possible to return to the way it was, but do I want that? Do I really want that?"
I'm intrigued by this idea of yours that the state of being restless might be deeply uncomfortable, but at the same time, it can be a gift. Tell me where the gift is.
I feel like that's been a hard fought thing for me that I haven't fully mastered but I think the gift is when we get into those middle places. The Hebrew scriptures talk about wilderness a lot. And I like that image. Because wilderness is a place where you lose all of your normal abilities to cope. [The] first thing it does is it forces us into that lizard brain, that survival mode, that fight, flight, flop or flee. You get into that place where you want to find a way out of it, and when you realize finally that you can't, this ability to abide in the middle of it, it teaches us resilience.
As a person who identifies as a Christian, I see the imagery of Jesus going through three temptations in the wilderness. And to each one, he sort of points to the fact that temptation is not the thing. The ability to get out of this, the ability to feed myself, the ability to be spectacular is missing the point entirely. The point is to get to that place where we are so content with having everything stripped away, and having our dependence on something greater than ourselves, having a dependence on the "Divine," that we develop a different kind of resilience, a different kind of contentment, a different sense of how we belong.
I think that's a big question right now, especially for friends of mine, who are younger generations: "Where do I belong in this global community? Where do I belong when my family's politics has changed? Or, my faith community, [if] I can't be part of that anymore, where do I belong? And we find out your little belongings, your everyday ones — your relationships with God, self, and others — those things are going to change over time. But what doesn't change is that you do, at your core, belong to the "Divine." You belong to yourself. And you have a place of belonging with other people. And that's the gift — and it's not an easy gift to receive. Which is why I think this book is so paradoxical, because it's the one thing we don't want, but also maybe the one thing that we need most.
There's [a] powerful line of John O'Donohue's, "Everything that happens to us has the potential to deepen us." Tell me about a time when being restless has deepened something for you or deepened something in you.
There's a story in the book where I'm sitting in the lobby of an inpatient mental health centre, and my daughter has talked to us, my wife and I, about the fact that she feels like she wants to take her own life. And as a parent, there was nothing that anyone could do. There's no book for that. There's no script. And so I just sat in this waiting room.
I'm sitting there and filling out some paperwork and it's mid-pandemic lockdowns. And the whole time, in the corner of the room, there's this TV and it's showing one of those property rehab shows. And with nothing else to do, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking about my parenting and I'm thinking about the future and I'm just broken for my daughter inside. In the meantime there's these lovely people on TV who are trying to choose between subway tile or a different kind of backsplash. And I'm thinking, I don't know how these two worlds exist. This is their great concern. My concern is, can I keep my daughter alive to see her 16th birthday?
I think it was the space inbetween the trivial things that had bothered me 24 hours before, and this relatively new situation. And I had to reach for something. I had to reach deeper for my connection to the "Divine," for sure. But I also had to reach deeper into myself as a parent and say, "What are you going to do here? You can't go back to the time when your greatest concern was whether she would eat her vegetables or whether she would get an A in AP [chemistry] class. Your concern now is his life or death. And that was an extremely deepening time.
One of the big questions you mentioned earlier is, "Where do I belong? Do I belong?" And you have a really interesting approach to this, that on some level, the answer is you already belong. How did you come to that place of security and reassurance and deep trust and belief and belonging?
I will let you know when I get there. I think I'm riding on a promise in a lot of ways. I'm riding on a promise because I believe that's true, because I've seen it in other people, and I have these little flashes, where I see it in me.
I think this is the mark of maturity. [It's] just being able to know, if I lived in a cave, with no other person and no other work to do, I would still have this complete and unshakable and certain belonging that the "Divine" has given me as a gift. And if I embrace that, and all the stuff that it brings — being restless with not having the accolades and and maybe not feeling the warmth sometimes of relationships, really owning the loneliness that comes with it — then I will grow into becoming something that I never thought I could be. And I will blow it, and some days I'll get it. But ultimately, that's where I'm headed.
THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. We're giving away a copy of Casey Tygrett's book, The Gift of Restlessness: A Spirituality for Unsettled Seasons. If you'd like to be entered in the random draw, email us at tapestry@cbc.ca with "RESTLESS" in the subject line.
Read the CBC's contest rules here.
Q&A edited for length and clarity. Produced and written by McKenna Hadley-Burke.