Ever feel like a failure? Or wonder why, no matter how hard you may try, certain relationships or projects just don’t work? Or why success is so often narrowly defined in this society by a string of degrees, acronyms, what boards one serves on, or the dollar amount of one’s salary?
If you do – don’t feel guilty. Many of us swirl in that place often and wonder how to extract ourselves, discontinue the pattern, the old tapes running in our heads that tell us what we are not, rather than what we are, that tell us what we cannot do rather than what we can.
I have no easy answers to this swirling place of doubt, misery and self-pity. It is a human place, borne of our frailty and imperfection. It is also a teacher, a necessary place, a house of fears we must enter in order to learn and grow and become less vulnerable to the chaos of the roiling Universe.
I have learned that running away is not an option.
Run and the Universe will bite you in the ass, hard, and you’ll come to realize one day you’ve limited your options. Every door you open is a closet stacked high with your unexamined life, accumulated baggage piling up high and in danger of toppling and crushing your spirit.
Your big fat, bristling ego slams the door shut with a loud, “Harumph!” refusing to deal with your frailties, mistakes and rationalizations because it’s very existence feels threatened. This too is human. And so it is that you run ... again ... and the cycle continues.
The thing is, the longer you wait to sort through the closets, the more rotten the baggage becomes.
Many years ago a wise woman taught me this, and one day when I was on the ropes and so tired and felt like my life was ending before it even began properly, I gave in.
I softened for a moment and opened the closets. I took a deep breath and began the seemingly monstrous and unending task of sorting through my baggage, my old tapes, my putrefying pile of tattered relationships, hopes and dreams. This I will tell you is very hard work and truth be told, it never ends.
Each time I go to this house now, and sort through another closet, I’ve learned that although the process is painful, it is much like thinning the plants in your garden. You do so in order to give the remaining plants room to grow. The plant whose life you end is not really ended and certainly not wasted. You either eat it, compost it, or replant it elsewhere, but in any eventuality, its energy returns once again to the field of life.
Likewise sorting through and thinning your baggage is not undoing your mistakes or failures, or killing your dreams and hopes.
It’s simply learning to be with them, to turn them over and over until they unlock, and click into place. When they do, another defense falls, I melt a little more, lose a little more of myself to find a little more of myself.
In the blink of an eye, in this house full of closets, shadows and paradoxes, the baggage shifts, the back wall of the closet falls away, and like the mystical wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’ timeless novel, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” suddenly I see there is a world beyond the shadowy closet. In this world full of light, color, swirls of radiance, hope and dreams shine bright. The dreams are often different than the ones I started with years ago, but they remain the stuff that makes life worth living, the seeds of hope planted. A circle of warm light surrounds me here in the midst of a dark world of pain, and there is peace, perfect peace.
I cannot stay in the circle forever. Like the closet of shadows, the circle is only one place in my journey, a place to be for awhile. Both places and others as well, exist to make me, you, who we are.
Do not be afraid of the shadows, of becoming nothing, of melting away, or of light, darkness and the grey in between. Nothing holds gifts beyond measure.
“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate’ (Amor fati). Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need.’
It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment -- not discouragement -- you will find the strength is there. Any disaster that you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!
This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true.
Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.” -- Joseph Campbell
