Why I Watch For Signs From Life

A ritual that helped me out of depression

Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.

— Sally Brampton

Disclaimer: I wrote this story not to offer any advice about how to get out depression. It simply is my story about a ritual that helped me.

I have a ritual of hiking at least every other week. But I fell into a bit of a rut last December and didn’t hike at all. I resolved to get back to the trails starting on January 1st, which I did.

As I walked on the narrow muddy trail along a dense forest ledge, I hugged moss-covered trees whenever I thought no one else was watching. It felt so good to be out in nature again.

This is the sign of love from life, I said to myself, just as I had hundreds of times in the past when I spotted something to be grateful for. There is a little backstory to why I watch for signs.

I was depressed and I needed to do something about it. I believe that there are at least fifty shades of darkness in depression and each person experiences it differently. Mine was only a lighter shade. I don’t know what it is like to have the pitch black kind of depression. All I know is that severe depression is an illness that needs to be treated as such.

However, regardless of the difference in intensity and cause, depression tramples our love for life. Some people fall completely out of love with life. In the past, I’ve fallen half-way out; I have a tendency to go through mildly depressive periods every once in a while.

When I began experiencing an episode of depression in fall 2017, my husband, son, and I had just come back from what we thought of as a once in a lifetime trip around the world. After six months of being blissfully away, we found ourselves broke and back in our cramped and dark apartment in California.

My husband returned to teaching and I started a new job. There was nothing super stressful going on except I still clung to an idea of what my life should’ve looked like by then. I resisted starting a new chapter in my life. I lacked perspective about my situation and beat myself up for my past mistakes.

In reality, I was a little lost and just needed to let go and let my life take its own course. It took me months to crawl out from the dark place in my head.

One morning, I let myself enjoy the warmth of sunlight on my neck during my bus commute to San Francisco. This was the beginning of my deliberate attempt to heal.

Little by little, I allowed myself to enjoy things like bird watching, the beautiful colors of autumn leaves, raindrops on flowers, and the smell of pastries wafting from coffee shops on my way to work. I began making friends and attending lunch hour yoga classes at work.

This is the sign of love from life, I reminded myself whenever I noticed something uplifting. The more I noticed the beautiful things, the better and lighter I felt.

A part of my depression came from living in an apartment with most of its windows facing north. We had searched for a more spacious and sunnier place to rent for months without success. In winter 2018, not long after beginning my ritual of looking for gifts from life, we found a beautiful place to move into.

It has a backyard with trees and plants that attract birds, bees, and butterflies. It lets in just the right amount of sunlight all day. Our home became my healing space and sanctuary.

Then there was another incident not long after we moved in. At work, I couldn’t get along with my manager whose obnoxious personality had created a toxic work environment. There was no hope of getting away from her, short of quitting my job.

One day I went to work and was pleasantly shocked to learn that she had given her notice after working there for 19 years. Things at work improved for me as soon as she left. I considered it to be another gift from life.

So, as if searching for Waldo, I look for signs in my life and can always find them. I think of it as a form of gratitude practice rather than some kind of law of attraction. I just focus on spotting beautiful things around me.

Strangely, it never occurred to me to look for signs of my own self-love until now.

Love yourself as if your life depends on it because it truly does.

— Anita Moorjani

I think we all know that our health and happiness depend on self-love. I believe that loving ourselves is the best way to show that we love and honor life. In a way, my ritual of looking for and appreciating small gifts of life has been an act of self-love.

Years ago I read Anita Moorjani’s book Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer to Near Death, to True Healing. One particular thing I remember from Anita’s story is how she emphasizes the importance of doing whatever we do from a place of love instead of fear.

When one of her best friends fell ill with cancer, Anita became obsessed with eating healthily out of fear of getting the disease. She got it anyway. During her near-death experience, she understood why she became ill. She wrote,

“The most frequent question people ask me is why I think I got cancer. I can sum up the answer in one word. Fear. What was I afraid of? Just about everything including failing, being disliked, letting people down, not being good enough. I also feared illness, cancer in particular as well as the treatment for cancer. I was afraid of living and I was terrified of dying. Fear is very subtle and it can creep up gradually without us even noticing it… One of the things I believe is that we already are what we spend our lives trying to attain, but we just don’t realize it.”

Excessive fear wreaks havoc on our physical and mental health. Looking back, I now see that fear underlay the angst I felt while going through depression.

These days, many of us are making New Year’s resolutions. Do we inadvertently make some of them from a place of fear rather than love? Do we question where our desire to improve and fix ourselves comes from?

Walking on a muddy trail through my favorite forest on New Year’s Day, I thought about these questions and then I realized that my little ritual of looking for signs is coming from a place of self-love and gratitude. I told this to the trees and resolved to keep on looking.

Thank you for reading. This post was inspired by Amy Marley’s essay below. Thank you, Amy.