"Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies."
- From "The Shawshank Redemption"
Hey,
Brother, before anything: I’m real sorry to hear about your operation and a little concerned that you discharged yourself against doctor’s orders – and in the obvious state you’re in. But they do say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?
Don’t touch my advice if you don’t want it, but you might take a little time about now to look at your very real blessings, my friend. I can’t enumerate them for you, but am sure they include a fundamentally excellent position at a good school; an established writing career - with credible writing and other artistic talent and residence in one of the best areas in the city – if not the country – and certainly in the world.
I bet there’s much more. And speaking of the world…to offer a little more perspective: think for even just the length of this sentence about how many BILLIONS of people in this world do not enjoy the lifestyle most of us take for granted and you are apparently so miserable about, and the still BILLIONS among them who for whom your lifestyle, with all the latent opportunity it entails, are configured that such be beyond their greatest possible aspirations, let alone their wildest dreams.
Caught your breath on that one yet…?
I am certainly not trying to deny that your troubles have become a very real thing for you. Honestly, while my instinct tells me it would provide no benefit to offer you the “poor lad” treatment, I believe you and still empathize. I may not have shared your experience, but I understand the pain you’ve been busting your nuts to try and get your head around.
And it’s also not a cheap shot for me to point out here that everyone goes through pain, to one degree or another. When pain is happening to you, though, there’s no such thing as relativity. It’s absolute. But, mate, it’s what one does when in the middle of such a shit storm that is both the ultimate test of one’s mettle as well the major determinant of what comes next.
I have this very good friend, who taught me one of the most important things I’ve ever learned in this life. I’d read it before, in different and often elegant ways, but when you’re at or near rock bottom and it’s worded just so, at just the right time, it can hit you in the face like a slapstick frypan. It did me.
He said, “You get what you get ‘coz you do what you do.” It really is that simple, but there’s more: he goes on to say, “And you’ll keep on doin’ whatcha doin’ until you’re done doin’ it.” He’s from Portland, Oregon. I dig the way he speaks, but it’s the very simple, diamond-tipped truth of it that makes what he says seem actually magical. …It’s a strange old world, isn’t it, when something as basic as truth should seem as unreal as magic?
I understand the departure from the everyday needed to follow the thread I am laying out here. Because of that, I will understand if your first reaction is to recoil and you can’t make yourself give it the attention I believe it deserves. But if you do pause to consider until it hits you right, I promise that you will have found out The Big Secret – the one that the entire religious, corporate, political system seems hell-bent on keeping from us. They don’t want you to ever find this one out. They don’t want you to know, primarily because of the flow on to their profits and power plays. The real reason, though, is because of their fear, and that fear is a result of their own lack of understanding. They just don’t get it. To be fair to those caught up in that game and doing what they gotta do, very few really do get it.
You know this – you’re as much a product of this system as I am. It’s so fucking normal in our society for us to hustle, hustle, hustle for all we’re worth – hell, we’re taught to, from the time our feet first touch the ground. We learn to medicate ourselves with our lifestyles, and then instinctively lash out at those around us, our situation and our environment when things seem all wrong. Everything in our society, our upbringing and education points us 180 wrong: outward, urging us to blame others for our troubles. Look at our so-called leaders: George Bush is doing it and so is John Howard, but they’re just the latest in a long line. It’s been this way for quite some time.
With such learned bitterness eating away at us, giving us cancer and turning us one against the other, it was the hardest thing for me to do to stop my furiously churning mind long enough to listen to what I knew in my heart: I am the person responsible for all of my suffering.
All of it.
Brother, pain is an inevitable part of this life. You can’t stop it. To even try to look away only pushes it underground; to fester, grow out of sight and then erupt where and when you least expect it. The good news is that joy, love and happiness are also inevitable. But, funnily enough, repressing our enjoyment of the good things in life has much the same result as suppressing our pain, so it seems logical that it is not the pain but the very repression that fucks with our minds.
But the option open to everyone is suffering. This peculiar talent we humans have for wallowing in our pain is entirely optional. This knowledge and the certainty it births is a true blessing.
Certainty of its ephemeral nature gives me the ability to really go ahead and feel my pain, to face it and get on with the process. But it also allows me to move on when I’m “done doin’ that,” because there’s just so much damned beauty in this world to waste time dwelling on anything that persists just because I’m perversely willing it to. Basking in my pain used to shut me off from this beauty, producing the worst kind of downward spiral.
The thing is, as Tony Robbins says, I can’t control the wind but I can control my sails, and that’s what I’ve been learning to do. To me, this doesn’t mean changing who I am, it means revealing to myself who I am. That is my Rock and I get to watch the world break itself on me, instead of the reverse.
No, it’s not easy, especially with all of the so-called life skills I had beaten into me before I came to know better, these learned reflexes that taught me to cringe precisely when I needed to be standing as tall as I could.
…Now, to put all this in proper perspective: I most certainly am NOT holding myself out as any kind of role model here, I’m just trying to hold on to what I’ve got. The epiphanies with which I’ve been blessed over the years never fail to fill my open heart to surfeit, with all the force of Truth. But what beautiful nuggets I sift from this stream of Life then slip through my fingers, lost to the flow. A transient enlightenment I can recall but never recapture. I believe that my previous conditioning keeps running interference in this search of the ever-bigger picture revealed therein. Each tantalizing glimpse of Truth always seems independent of all others, all equal, never seeming to stack up towards anything discernible. Maybe they’re just too few, too far apart for such a large context. Maybe I’m just not ready.
Larry came yet again to my rescue. I had heard it from him before and thought I understood. But this time I saw Truth in his eyes, heard it in his voice as he said it and I understood - really understood: “All I know,” he said, “is that I don’t get to keep what I have unless I share it with someone. Whatever it is that you get from me sharing with you, I get it all back, sevenfold.” And I understood, just like that.
You see, I have been embarked on what has been, until this missive, an intensely personal, essentially private journey. Until quite recently, the very thought of sharing it with anyone but such a close friend as Larry was an unthinkable, embarrassing proposition. The reason I could share with him is that for the last few years he has been midwife to what has been a very grueling and totally self-absorbing pregnancy, some twenty five years long by my reckoning.
I was suffering when we met, but I just knew that he had something for me. He must’ve seen the same because, as we began to connect, it wasn’t long before we sparked on the right topic. And then my pain was outed and he simply asked, “So what do you want?”
I felt myself poised, at one of those classic forks in the Life road. I felt compelled by habit to duck and weave backwards, away from this dangerous topic. But something wonderful happened, almost simultaneously. Something else inside me, some deeper aspect of my character suddenly awoke, put its foot irrevocably down and said to me, “Where do you think you’re going?”
Maybe it was wishful thinking at the time, but knowing even then that I could trust him gave me the strength to make maybe the most important choice of my life, to date.
“I wanna be happy.” I replied. “I wanna get better.”
Larry smiled at me then. “So, why don’t you?”
He told me later that it was only my own willingness, openness and -maybe above all and because of my suffering- the ability to be honest about myself that showed me the door. And how many among us are there who, having seen the door, just can’t bring themselves to walk through it?
It hasn’t been easy at all, most of it, so conditioned am I to telling myself the same lies we all learn to sooth ourselves with as children. I’ve learned hard things about myself, but looking myself in the eye in the mirror now brings me joy. I’ve had to face my fears, only to find out they were nothing but phantoms, every single one. I’ve been learning to strip off the façade and, with ever-increasing focus and determination, burn away what I am not. In Buddhist terms, I have started polishing my mirror, so that I might better reveal myself to myself, and doing so with growing clarity and joy at what I’m finding.
And that’s why I feel moved to share with you now. Like I said, I don’t claim to understand your pain, but I know what pain is, just as we all do. I know I can’t make you understand, but I believe I’ve finally learned a way for me to keep what I’ve got - and I get to do that by sharing with you.
The very act of me putting all of this down here has done wonders to further drive this truth into me. If it is of any use to you at all then I am glad of that, of course, but I want you to understand that I’m doing it primarily for my own benefit, just as Larry did with me.
I really could go on and on here, but instead I’d like to finish this, with one of the most wonderful, most important truths I’ve heard expressed:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” - Used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 inaugural speech
Interestingly enough, I heard it while I was in the act of writing this very missive to you. Coincidence? I don’t think so!
You take care now, you hear?
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