It’s a “good news, bad news” kind of situation. Full of paradoxical torment/freedom. There is no substitute for the way that disillusionment spins one’s head around. What was, isn’t really. In a moment one is in another reality that isn’t adhering to any of the assumptions one is carrying. My first reaction tends to be some combination of disappointment, anger and confusion. All of that fails to deal with it. Then, if I’m willing, I start learning about what is more accurate about reality than I recognized.
Disillusionment introduces me to what I don’t really want to see. It is like some kind of consciousness cataract removal. All of a sudden, I have a clarified mind’s eye: I can see things that didn’t exist for me before.
I don’t like it, and I depend on it. The view from a collapsing reality is much clearer, and accurate, then the one I’d been investing in. While, it is true that this is a much more likely occurrence in an old person’s life, as they look back, it’s an aggravating favor that comes to us at any time.
Disillusionment is a moment of jailbreak. The mind, we have captured — our own — gets to reset. In the interim, reality morphs into another, more accurate, shape. One finds one’s footing on a different ground. This is the kind of disorienting
shape-shifting that convinces one that one has really been living in a wild place. Tremors are welcome after a shake of this size. Vigilance suddenly becomes a lifeline.
And, all of a sudden, a newly updated reality arrives. After all the anguish, and the charges of betrayal, one finally gets to look around. Things are not like one hoped, but instead things are clearer. A certain dismal fog has lifted. Things shine, more clearly defined, and somehow more real. The good news that has followed the Richter-scale event, is that it took a jolt like this to get closer to the bedrock one has been seeking.
Disillusionment turns out to be an unexpected gift, guidance from some mysterious place, re-directing one, leading towards a new sense of the flow. Someone, a stranger, just shouldered their big body in, disrupting everything, seemingly promising discomfort to come, but instead delivering an unknown gift of grace. Medicine arrives, despite ourselves.
