Handling What Cannot Be Handled

I awoke the other morning with a poignant clarity. For a moment, I don’t know how long it lasted, I knew why I was alive, what I’m doing here, how to proceed, and what I had chosen to be up against. During that blessed moment I thought of something I want to use this forum to explore.  I knew that when I felt most alive, absorbed, and meaningfully engaged, was when I was trying to handle what I could not handle. In other words, when I was overwhelmed by what I faced, I was more than I usually was.  This method of engagement, has not been the way I have wanted to live, but strangely enough, it has been when I am most alive. What follows is my intrigued inquiry into this phenomenon.

To be clear, what I am interested in, is the fact that the things that have made me feel incompetent, over my head, defeated, have drawn out of me competencies, awareness, and the discovery of new life. How can this be? This is entirely counter-intuitive. It is also just the opposite of what makes me a good, predictable, reliable, commercial entity. Through some kind of paradox the very thing that renders me capable, is the same thing that makes me feel incompetent!

I am realizing at an advanced age, almost too late (and it fills me with regret), that what really enlivens me, isn’t necessarily what I have chosen, but what has come along, chosen, and overwhelmed me. I have grown, been stretched more, not by the challenges I have taken on, but by the inescapable challenges that have made me cringe, shake, and feel uncertain. These moments, which I would have largely chosen to avoid, have been my greatest benefactors.

This is a scary realization. Whereas I thought I was choosing to grow myself, like a good, responsible seeker, instead I’m finding that I have actually preferred to take on what I thought I could handle, to consolidate and comfort myself, to feel some mastery, rather than feel the vulnerability of real growth. This realization is, for me, one that generates a complex reaction. I am amazed by the recognition that despite my preferences I have been met by the challenges that have grown me. Something is helping me! At the same moment I realize that I am being helped without my explicit consent. I am suffering from such help! I wonder am I handling my life or is this life handling me?

I don’t know the answer to such questions. I only know that had I the capacity to refuse, I might very well have avoided the very things that made me what I am. Left to myself, I might not be myself.  I thank God I wasn’t left to myself, or do I? I tell myself I like to stretch. But, do I like to be stretched? Am I free to exercise volition or not? Would I be, who I would like to believe I am, without going through some things I wouldn’t have chosen, some things, notably hardships, that have shaped me? The truth I am coming to, is that I am only partly mine, that I am defined as much by the difficulties that have shaped me, as I am of some shape I have chosen.

Why is this important to me? Life seems to be serving up just the hardships I need to grow. Isn’t that awareness enough? No, not really. My tendency to avoid what seems too hard, threatens my growth and development. There isn’t alignment between what grows me and my own proclivities. That seems to me to be a recipe for the worst kind of suffering. And, it makes growth look like being victimized. I want to at least be the co-captain of my own ship.

If that is the truth, if I want to exercise some real responsibility for my life, then I have got to develop a different attitude. Instead of avoiding what is hard, thinking something is wrong, I have got to lean into what is difficult, and be glad to be thus challenged. To go beyond myself, I’ve got to greet what reveals my incompetence and carries me beyond myself. Developing this attitude almost seems un-American. It doesn’t look like pursuing happiness. Or, does it? Real happiness and security, it now seems to me, lies in knowing I can do the difficult and grow and be more.

With this understanding, I recall a poem by Rilke, where he draws upon an Old Testament image of a prophet wrestling with an angel. In it he states, “This is the way he grows, by being defeated by bigger and bigger angels.” I’ve read that line and understood it to be about growth but I’ve never focused so much attention upon being defeated. Taking on what is bigger, and being ultimately defeated by it, won’t get me on the news, but apparently it will grow me. Handling what I cannot handle introduces me to a new me. How amazing!

There is one more thing. Life is a gift. This isn’t my life. It is one of the bigger angels. It kicks my ass around the block, corners me, pierces my heart, breaks me down, disables me, and keeps teaching me. It is, in Ram Das’s words,  “fierce grace.” I am being grown, despite myself. As Rilke said, ”What we fight with is so small (meaning my pedestrian human concerns). What fights with us is so big (meaning the angel that delivers me).” I cannot handle what holds me here. I have learned this much. I am a child of God, and like Jesus, I will be put to death, because I have been blessed by Life, an angel sent to shape me. Knowing this much, even as I am being reduced/enlarged, makes me Lucky. 

l/d

A Personal Terror

This report from the Slow Lane is kind of a joke, a bad joke. You see, it is about the fast lane, being trapped there, about feeling helpless. This is the story.

Just last week I was traveling home from work, in my car, on the freeway. I came to a place where the freeway narrowed to two lanes. Trucks were in the slow lane. So I moved over, into the fast lane, to pass the slowest traffic. Ahead there had been an accident. I didn’t know that. Soon traffic slowed to stop and go. The woman behind me noticed too late, and she rear-ended me.

I was stuck in the fast lane of the freeway, unable to move, in a disabled and damaged car (the rear of my car, I later learned, had been smashed into my back tires rendering them immovable), for a least a half hour. I sat in the damaged car, alone, unable to move myself, or the car, while other cars sped by me on the left (the accident occurred where there was a left turn lane) and the right. I became increasingly frightened.

As I sat in my car I felt deeply helpless. Cars sped past. I felt like I could be hit again. I didn’t know if my emergency blinkers worked, or could be seen behind me. I smelled chemical smells. I worried that the car might catch fire. I couldn’t go anywhere, my wheelchair, even if it was accessible (which it wasn’t) was out of the question. Getting out of the car, trying to get in my wheel chair, and wheeling across the freeway, would have been the most dangerous thing I could do. I just sat and waited, in danger, afraid, helpless, and felt my own vulnerability.

I was caught in the fast lane, the irony didn’t escape me, waiting, wondering if this was the end, watching others speed past. When the CHP arrived (she did call them) I was almost incoherent. He, the CHP officer, got me, and my car, off the freeway (by pushing my car). I was an emotional wreck, an incoherent, disabled, brain-damaged man; he wanted as little to do with me as possible. After making sure I was physically alright, he went to hang out with the woman and her child. He assured me he had called a tow truck, and then went away. She, at least apologized, gave me her pertinent information, and inquired about my well-being.

Later, after I was home, during the night, I awakened, afraid, and the tears came. I’m not the kind of man who tries to stop them. I’m crazier than that. Instead I felt my own terror, the helplessness that is my life, the quickness with which it could all change, and the pervasive sense of aloneness that accompanies it all. I was bereft, in the darkness, alone, uncertain, ambivalently and miraculously alive.

Now perhaps this is part of my particular delusion. But, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I had some strange feeling that what happened to me was happening to us all. Maybe I’m narcissistic, deluded, crazy, and too enamored of my special-ness. But the reason I feel compelled to write about this horrible experience, is because I have the feeling that you too are stuck, unmoving, endangered, in the fast lane. I don’t know how this could be true, I just have this terrible feeling it is.

The fast lane is a deadly place. We all have to go there from time to time. I wonder. Is this a necessity, do we inhabit it wisely, just for convenience, because it is there, at the speed of the economy, our own obsessions, the hubris of our own kind, and of course, is this really progress? So many of these questions I feel helpless behind, un-American to ask, a luddite, an elderly curmudgeon, and maybe I am. But, feeling helpless, trapped and disabled, a statistic in the making, leaves me shaking, and wondering about the de-humanization we have given over to, at the hands of massification, our excuse for development.

I lay awake in the night feeling like I am part of the wilderness that had just discovered a trap. I thought I knew what to be afraid of, what to avoid. But now, I had been captured by something else; something placed right here in my way. I am screaming, not so much in pain or fear, but with indignity and warning. Life has made room for the fast lane, but are we really ready for it?  Am I? I don’t know, I sleep walk into it just as easily as anyone, but for a terrifying time, I could feel the real consequence of this choice, and it arouses the question in me, is this the human I want to be? 

l/d

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I need your help. I’m starting a blog. This is an attempt to reach out, to put the Slow Lane out there more. I’m turning into a writer, now I could use an audience.  I’m going too keep sending these missives, these messages in a bottle, to you via email as long as I can, but I’m going to start a blog too. This will allow others to be touched, me to archive these pieces, and hopefully more interactions. Will you check it out, refer others to it (if you think it is valuable) and generally wish me well and support this endeavor. See my words at www.lucky-theslowlane