The Un-Promised Life

“We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.” ~James Hillman

This week I was in the presence of a number of people who are in the midst of hard trials: two young mothers who are facing life threatening illnesses, a friend who just lost her partner of 30 years, and a woman who lost both parents on the same day and is struggling to make peace with the fact that they will not be present to serve as guides for her children. It was a week of witnessing lightning strikes. When we are hit by lightning we are profoundly disoriented. Shock sets in, providing a buffer so that we can slowly absorb what is.

We are offered little cultural support to simply be present for the unfolding of our lives. Instead, from every conceivable messenger, we are given deadening images of the Good Life. The love of my life marriage. The inspired and well resourced job. The harmonious balance between work and leisure. Not too much sadness. And, for sure, not too many lightning strikes. And in this conception we shrink life down to a caricature of itself, consciously or unconsciously measuring ourselves and each other according to that caricature.

What happens when you release yourself from the idea that, when something terrible happens, it must be a design flaw?

Let’s say that I sink into a depression. There is little encouragement to sit down at the bedside of that depression and listen. As a result, I am not only dealing with depression, but with a secondary level of suffering that says this shouldn’t be. I then run around trying to fix myself.

Most often we do need support for depression, so this isn’t about judging anything that might help us out. But what if we were to also hold the possibility that depression is its own kind of medicine? At one level, we may wish that it would go away, but our soul often has a different perspective than our mind. Our soul doesn’t accept or reject any part of our lives. It simply witnesses.

Witnessing depression, I start to notice the way that it slows everything down, sometimes dragging me kicking and screaming to go within.

Perhaps to attend to my inner world.
Or to come to terms with something that is hard to face.

Or to nudge me into recognition that my outer life has drifted far away from my soul’s intent.

Evaluating life solely from the perspective of the mind, many of us have lost touch with our soul. When we perceive through the eyes of the soul, there is an unguarded and innocent stance in the presence of what is. There is a fullness to this, and a strength born out of our willingness to be present.

Our souls are the conduit between our Spirit and this world. We incarnate with the intent to evolve. We are not human beings with a spiritual dimension, but spiritual beings on an earth walk. When our souls descend into a body, our lives may be relatively benign, extraordinarily challenging, or brutal. But the soul is wise, and the journey here will be in service to it.

Picture the soul lowering itself into a river between two specific points on that river’s trajectory, representing the beginning and ending of a lifetime. One person may tumble over a waterfall. Another may float along uneventfully amidst dull and dreary scenery. A third may move along pretty nicely for some years, and then, suddenly, the water becomes tumultuous and chaotic leaving them gasping for breath. A fourth may dip into the river for one day, and then leave this earth, birthing and dying in infancy. Whatever river we have been lowered into, and whatever trajectory it takes, this is the soul’s journey. And our soul is driven by that which it has come to learn.

Nonetheless, we have been spoon fed Good Life images, and they are so profoundly soul numbing because they are so incredibly prescriptive. Today there was an email in my inbox from The Atlantic, and the subject line read, How to Build a Happy Life. There it is. That very line numbs our soul, inadvertently creating a sense of inadequacy.

This doesn’t mean that we always accept whatever has been given. Sometimes we need to stand up for wholeness or justice or truth. And this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to do when things get rough. And yes, there are situations in which we are not given the breathing room to stop and absorb what is happening to us. We literally can’t catch our breath because the blow to the belly is so hard.

However, when faced with difficulty we tend to move so quickly to the perspective that this needs to be fixed, that we don’t stop long enough to metabolize what is happening to us.

If we buy into the idea that things will go well for us if we follow Good Life instructions, then we feel betrayed when things don’t go according to plan. Inevitably, we fail to slow down long enough to be in the soulful presence of whatever is happening right here, right now.

Here is a story that illustrates an aspect of my own life that falls short of my own Good Life story, but has actually been nourishing for my soul. Since childhood I have carried around a fundamental feeling of not belonging. We moved every 10–12 years, at least up until now, and each time we did so I thought that this feeling might go away. But it never did.

When I was in my early fifties we moved to Taos, New Mexico and for the first time I felt connected to land. There was some easing up of this life long not belonging feeling because the land welcomed me so fully.

But I had also landed in an ancient place, a town with a pueblo that had been continuously inhabited for over a thousand years, a town with a Spanish population going back 500 plus years. And I knew that, although I would make friends and perhaps be a part of a small community here, I would always be an outsider. I saw this as a problem.

However, at some point I recognized that this was only a point of view. What would happen if I stepped out of this self prescribed framework and, instead, simply stood in the presence of what is? Releasing this framework opened up the space to step into this body and this ancestry and this heart and arrive right where I am. I remember my teacher once saying to me that someday I would settle into myself, finding a place to rest within. As a result, I would feel a sense of belonging no matter where I was in the world.

The story of my Aunt Ann is another illustration of the beauty of the un- promised life, as she was a person who was almost completely outside of the caricature of anything that we might strive for.

Aunt Ann lived in Bristol, Tennessee, the sister of my maternal grandfather. She had severe scoliosis. I knew her when she was in her elder years, and by then she was so hunched over that her face faced the ground. She was referred to as a “hillbilly,” uttered in a derogatory way, as was my grandfather. There was shame in my family around this. When I was a child, I was scared of Aunt Ann because she looked so twisted. I also sensed my mother and my grandfather’s shame about her.

We rarely stayed long when we visited her. But one night, we stayed longer. I must have been seven or eight years old. I sat across the kitchen table from my Aunt Ann, and I discovered her. She was smart as hell, and incredibly witty. She had a twinkle in her eye that suggested that she never lost touch with some kind of Cosmic joke. That evening, we laughed until our sides ached. It was the best time I had ever had with my grandparents. I fell in love with her that night.

She was like a tree that had to twist around a large boulder in order to grow, and as a result, has a knotted, intricate and crooked trunk. That was my Aunt Ann. She was a beautiful crooked tree. And I felt such kinship with her, because I was my own version of crooked.

You see, we pathologize the soul. When things get really rough, we pathologize our experience and ourselves.

That mama who lost both of her parents on the same day had a vision of what life was supposed to be like for her children. Her parents would serve as mentors and guides. But this was not to be, so that vision collided with the reality that was given. She needs to grieve this.

But once a certain amount of grief has moved, there is an invitation to trust what has been given, recognizing that we are looking at life through a pinhole, unable to fully grasp what our soul is up to. I am not referring to making meaning out of our lives. Making meaning is the mind’s perspective. The soul’s perspective of that mama’s loss may reveal itself to her at some point, or it may remain a mystery. But if we base our trust of life only on events that are in accord with the hollow and soul-less Good Life, we will live with an underlying anxiety because we know, at some level, that we can’t control what is given.

Life doesn’t promise us anything. But the mind forms an image of what should be, and when we are delivered something different we often feel disappointed and angry. This is normal. If that anger calcifies into cynicism, then our soul recedes and we lose the gift of innocence, expressed as an immediacy, a trust in life itself.

If our hearts get broken, we benefit from allowing them to break. We say, Here I am. This is what is given. As a result, we open to a greater and deeper compassion. Often we are able to remain present for what is only through the love and support of the people around us.

But we also do not want to exchange one set of prescriptions for another. There are times when our bodies recoil from suffering, and our minds rebel. We often need to rage, to say hell no. To trust life is to also trust our rage. Maybe we cannot face what has been given. Maybe we don’t feel strong. Sometimes we are screaming every step of the way. It is important to not stand in the presence of our experience according to another caricature of what should be.

Instead, we do the best that we can, and that is good enough. We come into a greater sense of presence if and when we can. And perhaps we don’t. Perhaps we can’t, and that is ok, too, as the soul loves the entire show, the soul loves everything.