Coming Out of the Darkness

I recalculated this morning in the dark as I lay awake in my bed. November 26, 1952 to November 26, 2020—that’s sixty-eight years. I’ve always made it a point of honor to not quite remember my age—refusing, in my own mind, to be defined by a number. It’s getting easier to forget. Even as I write sixty-eight, seventy-eight comes to my mind and it takes me just a fraction of a second to locate my self on the alleged time-line. Both are big numbers reserved for ‘old people’ and feel somewhat alien to me.

When I was in fourth grade I knew that a man was always ten years older than the woman he married. Being nine, I calculated that my future wife had not yet been born. Little did I know that my wife of the years to come (which I am living at this moment) was already a precocious student of the second grade—delighting her teachers and teaching her friends.

School was arduous for me. I was so eager to please and the rules kept changing. I’m reminded of my daughter once saying to me that I was lucky to be a grown-up. When I inquired as to why that might be, she said that when you’re a kid they expect you to learn something new all the time, but when you’re a grown-up it’s all the same. I think I made some feeble counterargument about life-long-learning, but I got her point. In school, they keep moving the goal posts. You master one skill—or get enough of a sense of it to fake your way through a test—then you have to go on to the next.

The good news and the bad news about learning is that it never ends. Life is an ongoing experiment of trial and error. Just after we finally arrive at some brilliant insight and an elevated equilibrium, life gives us the next impossible issue. Each new problem requires we use everything we have already learned as well as uncovering some new tool, understanding or perspective we can’t even imagine. I think it was in the movie Junebug where one of the characters says ‘God loves you just the way you are but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.’ The ultimate tough love of the universe. We’re always on the edge. What we know up to this point is all necessary but not sufficient to get us to the next place we need to go. As one author put it succinctly in his book title: ‘What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.’

One of the things we rarely discuss in our praise of continual learning is that all learning involves loss—loss of certainty, loss of mastery, loss of identity. Learning something new about ourselves or about the world means that some understanding we had is disrupted—made more nuanced, experienced at a deeper level, or even directly contradicted. In many areas of our life, this is not a big deal. When I learn that margarine is a decent substitute for butter for the topping of an apple crumble, it doesn’t cost me a lot of anguish. I just tuck that new understanding away in hopes of making future deserts that the whole family can eat and appreciate.

But when the new understanding has to do with the ongoing nature of my capacity for unskillful action, and when I see anew the impact of those actions on people I care about, I am chagrinned, sad and angry. After all these years, I still don’t like to make mistakes – especially when my mistakes cause pain to other people. (Actually, I don’t mind making mistakes, because when I’m making them, I don’t think they are mistakes or I wouldn’t do them. It is the realization that I have made mistakes that I find particularly painful.) My first reaction when confronted with this ongoing realization of imperfection is to withdraw—a kind of ‘If you don’t like me, I’ll take my marbles and go home.’ On some deep internal level, I have equated making mistakes with being unworthy of human contact. I preemptively withdraw into a very dark place. Any contact, even well-intentioned feels almost unbearable.

This dark place is terribly familiar. It’s like I’m abducted into the underworld and am helpless to get out. Sometimes it’s for just a few seconds. Sometimes it’s a few hours or days. I have also known weeks and seeming months of dark disconnection. Recently, after a difficult conversation, I found myself in such a place. The new part was that in the middle of my confusion and anger, I was also curious about this place of dislocation and darkness. I thought of Dante’s preface to the Divine Comedy where he says ‘In the middle of my life, I woke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.’ And I thought ‘THIS is the place he was talking about.’ It’s not just me.

I imagined I was sinking down into the darkness of the great ocean. Slowly and slowly falling deeper and deeper. Until a whale came and swallowed me up. And there, in the fetid darkness was my old friend Jonah, sitting in an easy chair reading a book of poetry and sipping a cup of tea. He warmly welcomed me and said that after his adventure in Ninevah, he decided to retire and come back here. ‘It’s quiet and still here. No one bothers you and, after a while, you get used to the dank smell and the low light.’ I settled in with him for a while, reassured by his story of being spit up at the appropriate time on the appropriate beach.

The next day, I called my mother who told me that she and my Dad went to the hospital in the morning, the day before Thanksgiving sixty-eight years ago, but then went home. Then, in the afternoon, they went back again and I was born. While her mother watched my 14 month-old brother, the doctor stood aside and positioned a mirror so she could watch as I emerged onto the beach of this world. My first and most appreciative audience.