LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Sarah Jones!

So very, very, very much of it

Dear Lovelets,

I send you salutations and greetings from the last week of my book tour for ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER — and not only was I happy to meet so many Lovelets, I was happy to see that so many Lovelets were meeting one another! I have always loved it when my friends meet my other friends, and my friends become friends with each other. I feel like there should be a simple term for “that feeling of being happy when your friends like your other friends” — but whatever that term is, I AM HERE FOR IT.

Here is a story of cross-Lovelet friendship that moved me so tenderly. Our beloved two-time contributor Arshay Cooper (and the man who invented the term “Lovelets” for us) had a book come out recently. His book is called LET ME BE REAL WITH YOU, and it’s about the lessons he has learned about how to take care of oneself while also trying to take care of the world. He was selling copies of the book at the Head of the Charles rowing race (I’m sure it’s called something fancier than a “rowing race”), because a lot of his book is about his experience as a rower and a coach. Now listen to this! A Boston Lovelet heard that Arshay was going to be at the race all day, and she asked if he needed any help selling books. She reached out to him only because she knows him from this community, and because she loved both of his letters. She’d never met him personally, but she wanted to make herself available to help out a fellow Lovelet. So she and her boyfriend spent the entire day driving books around for Arshay, carrying books, and helping him out in every way — and she wouldn’t accept anything in return for all the assistance she offered. She just wanted to show up as love, for love.

Because that is what we do, people.

THAT IS WHAT WE DO!

Speaking of showing up as love — I encourage you to sprinkle a few responses this week to other people’s letters from Love in the comments section. Reach out to a stranger and reflect back to them what you heard or saw in their letter. It can be so scary and vulnerable for people to post their words here (especially the newcomers) and it means so much just to have someone say I see you. Or, as I often say: I see you, I hear you, I am you. (Because it is true!) And who knows? Maybe you’ll make a new friend. Maybe you’ll meet someone who will volunteer to carry heavy boxes of books around for you someday. You never know!

Our special guest this week is my old friend, the fabulously talented actor, playwright, filmmaker, and all-around wonderful human being Sarah Jones (who is now here on Substack with us!). Sarah does a lot. Sometimes she gets exhausted from it all. I bet you can relate. That’s what her letter is about. Let’s see what her Spirit of Unconditional Love (what we call SOUL around here) has to say about exhaustion. Spoiler: it is deeply reassuring, as well as beautiful and beautifully expressed.

Okay, my loves — let’s keep going.

I adore you all,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about exhaustion?

Little crumb of pumpkin bread, what perfect timing! We are so happy you are asking this question right this very moment, when you are experiencing some tiredness, because that makes it so much easier for you to relate to the question, and so much easier for us to reach you through the cracks in your normally far shinier and more lacquered surface.

Exhaustion: fun topic!

First of all, here is what does not make you exhausted: working, traveling, staying in hotels, getting on airplanes, talking on stages, meeting strangers, writing books, doing service, being interviewed, using your body, using your voice, using yourself up with lots of activities until you are so tired that you want to collapse.

That is not exhaustion. That is just the experience of being physically tired, and we have been over this already with you in the past: it is never a problem to be tired. It is wonderful, in fact, to live life with such enthusiastic vigor that at the end of the day you are fatigued, and ready for bed. That is not a problem.

There is such a thing as physical exhaustion — a bodily weariness that is far past merely “tired” but you have been very privileged in your life to have experienced little of it — and when you did experience physical exhaustion, it was because of hard, honest work, or through some experience of sports or adventure that pushed your body past its normal endurance levels. And again, this did not break you, because it’s a good experience to do honest work, or to push yourself to test the boundaries of your endurance. You may call yourself very lucky indeed that you have never been forced into real physical exhaustion by another person, or by dire circumstances outside of your control. You are lucky and you know you are lucky, sweet one.

Mental exhaustion, however, is a different thing. Mental exhaustion is something that you have had many times. Mental exhaustion is something that only your mind can do to you.

Tiredness and physical exhaustion can be cured pretty much immediately by rest; mental exhaustion cannot. When you are mentally exhausted, you go to bed exhausted, and you wake up just as exhausted. Just as there are certain kinds of loneliness that cannot be cured by having other people around, or certain kinds of need that cannot be sated by engaging in any sort of satisfying behavior, there is a level of exhaustion that cannot be remedied by taking a rest, lying down, by sleep, or through what is called self-care. When you are in mental exhaustion, it feels like you will never have your vitality again.

Mental exhaustion is a spiritual malady, my love, masquerading as an emotional weariness.

And that kind of exhaustion, our dearest pip, is nothing more than separation from me, from us, from the Spirit of Unconditional Love.

Mental exhaustion, when you are in the grip of it, feels like death. It feels like powerlessness (and not in the good sober 12-step way). Fear, anxiety, resentment, shame, blame, and obsession possess your mind, and drain your spiritual resources until you feel that there is no love in the world, and certainly no love in YOU. And that’s what leaves you exhausted — the draining away of your very heart, of love itself. Because that is what the Latin root of the original word “exhaust” means: to drain away.

Darling, you have been mentally drained away many times in your life, and sometimes for years on end. Always, for you, this exhaustion has been in reaction to some person, or people, in particular. Relationships and the understanding of others, can be the most draining, difficult aspect of your experience in Earth School, sweetheart — and they don’t have to be romantic relationships to exhaust you.

People bewilder you and frighten you, or you react to them in ways that bewilder or frighten yourself. Families confuse and overwhelm you — and not only your family, but the families of others.

We can simplify the explanation for you of why people (or rather, your thoughts and feelings about people) can leave you feeling so exhausted that sometimes you long guiltily for the silence and isolation of the pandemic lockdown again, where nobody could come within six feet of you, and there was a part of you that loved that silence immensely.

The Buddha said that all suffering (what we would call exhaustion today) comes from attachment to your desires. You suffer either because you didn’t get something you wanted, or because you got something you didn’t want. And other people, my love, are fabulous delivery engines for either giving you things you didn’t want, or not giving you things you did want.

Look at how disappointed you are in your human family when they don’t give you love, or the right kind of attention, or when they don’t agree with you, or when they criticize you, or when they dare to see the world differently, or when their political views are not in alignment with yours, or when they dare to have different values or priorities than you, or when they hurt themselves in ways you don’t want them to, or when they hurt others in ways you don’t want them to, or when they bother or harass you, or try to control you, or when they won’t let you control them, or when you can’t change their minds, or when you make demands upon them that they will not deliver, or when they make demands upon you, or when they ignore you, or when they won’t help you, or when they won’t let you help them . . .

They are so exhausting, these people!

But darling, you already know what we’re going to tell you. The cause of your mental exhaustion is not other people. The cause of your mental exhaustion are your thoughts, feelings, and opinions about other people. The cause of your mental exhaustion is your attachment to your judgments about them, and your certainty that they are doing something wrong. And that’s a you problem, little sunrise — not a them problem. Your mental exhaustion is not their fault; it’s a result of your own disordered thinking ABOUT them. All of them. Any of them.

Tiny shoelace, this is the thing that will always exhaust you: your opinions about your human family. WHY ARE THEY LIKE THIS? They are like this because they are. They are like this because that is reality. And arguing against reality is a wonderful way to mentally exhaust yourself even further.

But what if we told you something profoundly radical, sweetheart? What if we told you that in our eyes, in the eyes of Unconditional Love, nobody is ever doing anything wrong, that people (including you) act in harmful ways because they are in confusion and they are separated from love, that you are no better or worse than anyone on the planet, that every single one of you is so precious beyond measure that nobody will ever be punished or banished in this cosmos, and that the thing that will hurt you more than anything is the belief that you have ever had, will ever have, or could ever have within the family of humanity such a thing as an adversary?

To believe that you have adversaries is to believe that other people are wrong, and that is the most exhausting belief a human can hold. Only look what that belief is doing to your world. Please trust us, my love, that you do not have adversaries — even if people TELL YOU that they are your adversary. What you have before you, simply, are people who are in struggle, pain, and confusion — just like you. Or, as George Saunders calls other people when they’re acting up: “me, on a different day.” That’s what you have.

And remember, too, what Ramana Maharashi answered, when asked “How shall we treat others?” He said, “There are no others.”

It’s just you on a different day, baby.

Our suggestion is that you steadily learn to love what you call the others, just as you are learning to love yourself — and see if that sense of love can lift from you the sense of mental exhaustion that has dogged you your whole life. As you learn to love, forgive, and accept yourself just as you are, you will drop your attachment to wanting anyone to be different than they are.

We happen to know that’s the only thing that works. Love them from a safe distance for a while if you must, keep away from the direct stream of their outrage and harm if you must, but love them. Love them all. Nothing else will bring you peace. Believe us, nothing else will bring you peace. Nothing else will bring you the deep spiritual peace that is the only remedy for the mental exhaustion that has caused you your whole life to be so stressed.

Now go take a shower and drink some coffee and remember who you are — and what you came here to be, to believe, to learn, to imbibe, and to share.

We offer you this love in the hope that you, all of you, will finally be able to get some rest. Come with us if you want to live. Your only hope is unconditional love. Good thing we have so very, very, very much of it.

Prompt

This week’s prompt is only for anyone who has ever been exhausted. If that’s not you, you can keep scrolling.

Oh look, no one left!

Whether your exhaustion is emotional, physical, or some combination thereof (and doesn’t it feel like one always leads to the other?) let’s try to understand it together: where it comes from, what it means, how we react, what we can learn. Let’s get quiet, shut out everything else, and write down this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about exhaustion?