Читать книгу How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 9

The great statesman Henry Kissinger summed it up succinctly: “Next week there can’t be any crisis. My schedule is already full.”

The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to a place where we think we can’t handle what is happening It’s too much. It’s gone too far … There’s no way we can manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good. No matter how hard we try, it just won’t work. Basically, life has just nailed us. —Pema Chodron

When I was in elementary school, I had a teacher whom I will call Mrs. Rhodes. She was one of those educators whose choice of vocation was a mystery, for it was obvious, even to me at the tender age of eight, that she possessed an intense dislike of children that she made no attempt to hide from us. Determined to retaliate, the little boys used to amuse themselves by tossing wads of spit-covered chewing gum at her head when she wasn’t looking, hoping to implant their peppermint-scented weapons in her tight mass of metallic-gray pin curls.

Mrs. Rhodes was a stickler for accuracy in all things, and one of her favorite ways to torture us was to excoriate us for our mistakes in front of the entire class. I will never forget the time I became the “victim of the day.” We were in the middle of a writing exercise, and I raised my hand to make a request.

“Yes, Barbara?” Mrs. Rhodes said scowling at me.

“May I please be excused to go to the bathroom?” I said in as soft a voice as possible.

“Don’t mumble—I hate mumblers—what did you say?”

“I said, may I please be excused.”

“Why?” Mrs. Rhodes barked.

“I can’t believe she is going to make me say it,” I thought to myself. I took a deep breath. “Because I want to go to the bathroom.”

Everyone in the class began to giggle. “SILENCE!” Mrs. Rhodes shouted, and then she turned back to me. “Barbara De Angelis,” she said, “So you want to go to the bathroom. Well, we all want lots of things, don’t we, class? But we don’t get them! No ma’am.”

“Please, Mrs. Rhodes,” I pleaded, “I just want to go to the bathroom.”

Mrs. Rhodes walked up to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and in large letters wrote the word W-A-N-T. “Do you see this word, class?” she squawked. “To use it is to express a personal preference, as in ‘I want to play on the swings’, or ‘I want to eat a candy bar.’ It does NOT mean the same thing as this word—” and she spelled out N-E-E-D. “This word does not express a personal preference, it expresses what one considers a necessity, a requirement, an emergency, as in, ‘Mrs. Rhodes, I need to go to the bathroom.’”

She turned back toward me. I had sunk down as low as I could in my metal chair, for even my little eight-year-old brain knew what was coming next. My classmates were giddy with anticipation, drunk with the joy of watching someone other than themselves be mortified.

“So, Barbara, would you like to rephrase your statement?” Her voice oozed with disdain.

Like a confession given to the enemy only under prolonged torture, the words came tumbling reluctantly out of my mouth: “I … I … nee … need to go to the bathroom!”

“Well, then,” she said with a sick smile, “why didn’t you say so? By all means, go. We wouldn’t want you to have an accident, would we, class?”

I fled. The memory is so vivid, even decades later—my little legs speeding down the empty hallway toward the restroom, the sound of mocking laughter still echoing in the distance behind me. You will be relieved to know that I made it on time. Believe me, so was I.

I share this gruesome tale to make a point crucial to the premise of this book:

When we are uncomfortable enough in life, we will begin to ask questions in an attempt to relieve ourselves of our misery. We will do this regardless of how frightened we are of asking the questions or hearing the answers. We will question because we can’t not question anymore. We will question not simply because we want to, but because we need to.

And the question that rises up from deep within us will be: “How did I get here?”

At times of confusion, crisis, frustration and bewilderment, in moments as Pema Chodron stated above, when “life has nailed us” and we can no longer pretend that things don’t feel awful, “How did I get here?” is the most honest, and in fact the only response we can have. When you are squirming in your seat long enough, you have no choice but to finally raise your hand. As I learned from Mrs. Rhodes, when you have to go, you have to go.

If you get rid of the pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it. —Carl Jung

The process of gaining wisdom begins with the asking of questions. The word “question” is derived from the Latin root quaerere, which translates as “to seek.” This same root is the source of the word “quest,” to go on a search or a pursuit. Ultimately, that is what a question is—the first step in a search for knowledge, for insight, for truth.

We spend our life looking for answers. This need to know is deeply human and starts in our earliest years. Any parent is aware of this from having listened to the constant inquiries of his son or daughter: “Why is the sky blue? Where do we go when we die? Why do you wear glasses? How does Grandma’s voice get in the telephone? Where do babies come from?” As children, we turned to our elders with our questions, confident that they would have answers. After all, they were the grown-ups.

Now we are the adults, the ones who are supposed to have the answers for our own children or grandchildren, for our clients and employees, for our students and patients, for our customers and coworkers. So when we go through challenging times, when we stare into the unfriendly face of unexpected developments that have arrived uninvited into our world, it is hard to admit to others, and even to ourselves, that our minds are haunted by questions for which we have no answers, dilemmas for which we have no solution.

There are questions we formulate with our intellect when we want to solve a problem, for example, “How can I increase sales for my business?” or “How can I lose twenty pounds?” We ponder these questions when we have time or interest, and then when we’re tired of considering them, we put the questions in the “To Do” pile in our brain. And then there are the other kinds of questions, the ones that insistently push their way into our awareness and refuse to leave until they are heard: “How did I get here? What’s happening to me and my life?” These are questions that we cannot control. They haunt us like stubborn ghosts and will not be dismissed until we give them our attention.

Ingrid Bengis, a wonderful Russian-American writer, speaks eloquently about these moments in her book Combat in the Erogenous Zone:

The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you “come to terms with” only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will.

As travelers on life’s path, we are defined by both the questions we ask ourselves and by the ones we avoid asking. Just as when we were children, we encounter moments as adults when we need to ask, “How did I get here?” in order to become wiser about who we are.

Times of questioning are not moments of weakness, nor are they moments of failure. In truth, they are moments of clarity, of wakefulness, when our quest for wholeness demands that we live a more conscious, more authentic life.

How we deal with these crucial moments of self-inquiry determines the outcome of our journey. Embracing the question, we open ourselves to receiving insight, revelation, healing and the deep peace that can only be achieved when we are not running away from anything, especially from ourselves. Turning away from the voice that asks, “How did I get here?” we close off to growth, to change, to movement, and condemn ourselves to a pattern of resistance and denial. Why? Because the question doesn’t disappear. It eats away at us, gnawing on our awareness in an attempt to get our attention.

There is a classic Zen Buddhist story, or koan, about a person who is receiving instruction on passing through the Gateless Gate—the barrier of ignorance—in an attempt to discover the Truth of Life and to achieve the Buddha Nature. The Zen Master warns the student that in contemplating the ultimate question of the nature of reality, he will feel as if he has swallowed a red-hot iron ball that is stuck in his throat—he cannot gulp it down, and he cannot spit it out. All the student can do is to concentrate his full attention and awareness on the question and not give up, and his attainment of truth will be such that it will illuminate the universe.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Most of us do not greet the arrival of burning questions with a Zen-like attitude of acceptance, but rather with the kind of dread we feel when we are about to have painful dental surgery. We get very good at stubbornly ignoring the arrival of crises even while we’re in the midst of them. We become experts in negation—“What red-hot iron ball …?”—as we reach for our tenth glass of ice water.

Denial is no easy task. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to drown out the insistent voice of “How did I get here?” Some people turn to addictions to anesthetize themselves from the constant discomfort caused by the invisible presence of the question. Others distract themselves with everything from work to exercise to caretaking those around them—anything to avoid dealing with the issues they know on some level they must face. And there are those who lapse into “magical thinking,” convincing themselves that if they just act as if everything is going to be fine, some mysterious shift will happen and everything will be wonderful again—their estranged husband will suddenly fall back in love with them, their alcoholic wife will miraculously stop drinking, they will wake up one day and all the things they thought were wrong with their life will magically have vanished.

But this is not how it turns out. Instead, when we ignore the questions our inner voice is asking us, we suffer. We become irritable, angry, depressed or simply exhausted. We disconnect from ourselves, our dreams and our own passion. We disconnect from our mate and our sexuality. We turn off in every sense of the word.

It takes great courage to allow ourselves to arrive at the place at which we are finally willing to hear burning questions and begin to seek answers. It takes great courage to not freeze up in the face of our fear, to allow these difficult questions and painful realities to pierce our illusions, to shake up our picture of how we want our life to appear and confront it as it really is.

True transformation requires great acts of courage: the courage to ask ourselves the difficult questions that seem, at first, to have no answers; the courage to hold these questions firmly in our awareness while they burn away our illusions, our sense of comfort, sometimes our very sense of self.