In 2008 I was having so much trouble sleeping. I had just moved away from the capital, into the rural area, in an attempt to “find myself”.

Actually I can’t even begin to describe it. I was in a bad way. I remember my doctor was very subtle. I went to complain about the pain in my arms. After checking of at least 30 checkboxes on her computer screen for various tests to make, she sent me to get the blood works done. The results from the test for sicknesses I had not heard about came back the following week. She called me on the phone and I told her that I would prefer to have it face to face, if I was to be told that I had only 6 months left. She kind of laughed and we made an appointment.

Of course there was nothing wrong with my blood. And that was when she sprang it on me. “Had I considered the possibility that I had a depression?” She wrote up a prescription and home I went to ponder this new revelation. How could I have pain in my arms, and problems sleeping from being depressed? Was that not just another word for being sad?

I started reading. I had decided not to accept the medication. I am the type of person who thinks that the body knows what it is doing, and eating pills is just a subterfuge. But it was to be a long time before I ever became happier, because my wife quickly became tired of my mood. How was it she put it? “I have a light mind. I am not good at being sad” And then she left me. Only one week later had she miraculously found a new job and a new apartment. Perhaps the weeks of “going for walks” or sitting in the greenhouse had something to do with the surprising speed.

In any case that was not to be the end of my downward spiral, because only some months later my father died. This is when I seriously started thinking that maybe it was not worth it. I mean getting up again. I had daily thoughts about how tranquil it would be to just go into the woods and put an end to the misery. No notes or desperate calls for help, just quietness from the constant droning of ominous thoughts, an end to the sinking feeling in the gut.

It had all started a year earlier. I was living a normal life in the big city. Civil engineer gone IT, and then started my own company that went really well. Nothing big. But there was pride and a good income. You fill your life with all sorts of commitments. You don’t think how fragile it is. Mortgages, projects, diners and the obligations of image. And then one day I felt I had a flue coming on. A few days later the expected running nose and coughing did not arrive, instead massive pain in the neck. I had contracted aseptic meningitis. That is encephalitis; A virus in the brain. I did not leave the bed for almost 3 weeks. And the doctors told me it was benign. They only consider the vital signs. As long as my heart was beating then it was benign.

But it left me with my faculties unusable. It could literally not add 2 and 2 unless I willed my brain like some stubborn donkey. And I was in the business of knowledge, as an advisor. Over the next 6 months I got strong symptoms of stress disorders. I was a wreck, because I expected to fail at keeping my business going.

This is when I saw clearly that I had to remake my life. I needed to work with something else. When I told my wife this, she confessed that she had been so pressed on her job also that she had been thinking a lot about moving to stay in our other house in the rural parts. We decided to do it. She quit her job the next day.

Later; after she left me I worked hard on getting my new business set up. Today I haven’t got the foggiest idea how I managed, but I should think that I drew breath, and that is all. I read lots of books. Every moment I didn’t work, I spent reading. There was not much point in trying to see friends because I was so depressed. I now understood that a depression is not just a mood swing. It is more like brain damage. At least cognitive damage. A psychiatrist speaker at some symposium said; “Don’t ever try to tell a depressed person that his view is wrong. Because it is not. The world is truly an ugly place, and he is right about it. His problem is that he has finally realized it, and now he is not able to see the good.”

Of course the world is also a beautiful place. And I desperately needed to find my way back to that. I had always been so full of energy. An old friend that met me by chance on the harbor after a long cruise trip with my sailing boat said to me; “Yes you always just do thing”. A woman in Rome told me that I was a romantic.

But there is no going back. There is only forward.

I read a book by Tara Bennet. It was about emotions. My wife had told me that I harbored too many feelings. So that was a place to start. In that book were several references to Buddhism. And that stayed with me. I read a bunch of other self-help books, but kept coming back to Buddhism.

I had always been a declared atheist. I am a man of science. How could I not? I do not believe in some bloke in the clouds, who is said to have created it all. Come on? We are in the 21th century.

My first book that was not scientific, but only spiritual was by Thich Nhat Han a Vietnamese monk who lives in France. It may be that science is seeking the truth, but that book on Buddhism contained more truths than I had ever read in one single book.

So began my journey into Buddhism. I now have stitched together an understanding that I should have had when I was a child, had I lived in the East.

I meditate every morning by my house altar. I have found my way forward.

During my struggle for understanding, I also started travelling like never before. Alone. To meet other people and their families and children. I try to live like there is no tomorrow. I play with children like I am never going back to work, like time is of no essence. I help people where I can. Because now I can see the suffering in all living.

I am not brave. Not a hero, not smart, or handsome. I am nothing.

So if you are reading this very sentence then I humbly bow to you. I lay down in the dirt with no concern for my cloths. And I say to you, you are a miracle. You have just not seen it yet.

It is my deepest hope that I can help just one other person to become whole again. Because then it was worth it.