The Longest Day: Light, Shadow and the Courage to Remain

Today is the summer solstice: the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. A day when light lingers generously. A day that quietly reminds us that life is always moving, always changing, always becoming something else.

The seasons are among our greatest teachers. They ask very little of us, except that we pay attention. Again and again, they reveal that nothing remains fixed. Winter softens into spring. Spring stretches into summer. Summer will, in time, surrender to autumn. There is humility in this rhythm and perhaps a challenge too, because despite nature’s constant movement, many of us know what it feels like to become stuck.

Paradoxically, it is often when the world around us is changing that we most acutely feel our own resistance to change. We cling to certainty. We try to outrun grief. We attempt to make permanent what was never designed to stay. We forget, or perhaps we fear, that life is movement.

Over recent months, alongside my private practice, I have been working as Interim Director for a charity that offers respite to people experiencing acute suicidal crisis.

Every day, I am reminded that suicide is not a singular story. There is no one narrative, no one cause, no one explanation. To reduce it to a problem to be solved would be to miss its profound complexity. Suicidal despair sits within the wider landscape of what it means to be human. It touches questions many of us carry quietly through life: How do I continue? Where do I belong? What is my purpose? Am I too much? Am I not enough? Is there hope for me?

These are not pathological questions. They are human questions.

We live in a culture that often rushes towards solutions, diagnoses and certainty. Yet much of my work, both therapeutically and within suicide prevention, has taught me something different. People rarely need us to arrive with perfect answers. More often, they need someone who can remain present in the uncertainty without turning away.

The psychologist James Hillman offered a provocative challenge to conventional understandings of suicide. He suggested that, rather than moving too quickly to the question, “How do we stop suicide?”, we might first ask, “What is the soul attempting to communicate?” (Hillman, 1964). This is not an invitation to romanticise suicide, nor to diminish its devastating consequences. It is an invitation towards depth: to recognise that behind suicidal despair there is often an unbearable psychic burden seeking recognition.

Hillman understood that sometimes what longs to end is not the person’s life, but a particular way of living, a false self, an impossible burden, or a story that has become intolerable.

Similarly, Carl Jung wrote that “the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are” (Jung, 1954). Yet this journey towards becoming is neither linear nor comfortable. Individuation, as Jung described it, asks us to encounter our shadow, our wounds, our fears and our contradictions. It asks us to hold together joy and sorrow, hope and despair, vitality and exhaustion.

To be human is not to avoid darkness. It is to learn how to carry it.

This is something the psychotherapist Petruska Clarkson understood deeply. Clarkson wrote extensively about the therapeutic relationship, reminding us that healing is often less about intervention and more about encounter (Clarkson, 1995). Human beings are fundamentally relational creatures. We are shaped by connection, and we are wounded by disconnection. Often, in moments of suicidal crisis, what is most needed is not persuasion but presence; not fixing but witnessing.

I have seen, repeatedly, that small acts of kindness can become profound moments of survival: a cup of tea, a shared meal, a conversation that is not rushed, the simple experience of someone saying, “I am here with you.”

These moments may appear ordinary, but they are anything but ordinary.

Francis Weller writes beautifully about our collective exile from grief. He suggests that many contemporary struggles emerge because we have lost communal ways of holding sorrow (Weller, 2015). Instead, grief becomes privatised, hidden, and often experienced as a personal failure rather than an expression of love and humanity. Yet grief belongs to all of us.

Perhaps one reason so many people suffer silently is that we have forgotten how to sit alongside pain without trying immediately to eradicate it. We have become uncomfortable with vulnerability, even though vulnerability is one of the very experiences that connects us.

Rollo May wrote that “the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity” (May, 1975). I think about this often. There is immense courage in speaking about despair. There is immense courage in asking for help. There is immense courage in remaining alive when life feels unbearable.

There is also courage required of us collectively.

Can we become a society that allows complexity? Can we resist reducing suffering to a slogan? Can we create spaces where people are allowed to be contradictory, frightened, angry, exhausted and uncertain without being judged or abandoned?

Working alongside people experiencing suicidal crisis has reinforced something beautifully simple: hope is rarely a grand gesture.

Hope is often extraordinarily quiet.

Hope can be someone opening a front door.

Hope can be allowing another person to make you a cup of tea.

Hope can be one conversation.

Hope can be one night survived.

Hope can be a stranger saying, “You don’t have to carry this alone.”

On this longest day, as light stretches itself across the sky, I find myself reflecting less on the triumph of light over darkness and more on their coexistence. We need both. We come to know one because of the other.

The human condition has always held this tension: between despair and possibility, endings and beginnings, the wish to disappear and the quiet, courageous act of continuing.

The seasons remind us that life does not ask us to remain unchanged.

It asks us to trust movement.

Even when we feel frozen.

Even when we feel lost.

Even when we cannot yet see what comes next.

Perhaps that is where hope truly lives: not in certainty, but in the willingness to remain in relationship with life for one more day.

Today, on the longest day, may we remember that light is not something we achieve.

Sometimes, it is simply something we borrow from one another until we can carry it ourselves again.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, or finding life difficult to bear, please know that you do not have to hold this alone. Reaching out to someone you trust, your GP, or a crisis support service can be an important first step. If you are in immediate danger, please call 999 or go to A&E.

Below are some UK support numbers:

• Samaritans: 116 123, free from any phone, 24 hours a day.
• NHS 111: call 111 and select the mental health option for urgent mental health support.
• Shout: text SHOUT to 85258 for free, confidential 24/7 text support.
• CALM: 0800 58 58 58, 5pm to midnight every day.
• Papyrus HOPELINE247: 0800 068 41 41, for people under 35 and anyone concerned about a young person.
• Childline: 0800 1111, for children and young people under 19.
• SOS Silence of Suicide: 0808 115 1505

References

Clarkson, P. (1995) The Therapeutic Relationship. London: Whurr Publishers.

Hillman, J. (1964) Suicide and the Soul. New York: Harper & Row.

Jung, C.G. (1954) The Development of Personality. Collected Works, Vol. 17. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

May, R. (1975) The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Weller, F. (2015) The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.