Catch and Release
Loosening Our Grip on Life and Making Peace with Our Scars
““Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.””
Forty was something of a surprise for me a few years back. Not the age itself, of course, but how the realization of that year opened certain things within me. I didn't see it coming, not because it's an uncommon age for rumination. On the contrary, it tends to be a big one for a lot of people. But I'm such an over-analyzer already, someone who thinks intensely about everything all the time. I had been in my thoughts for sometime by that point. The beginning of the upcoming fifth decade was something I'd already felt I'd come to terms with. Not quite, it turns out. Like most things in life, theory and preparation only go so far. Until you're living through a certain season or making your way through a struggle, you simply don't know exactly how it's going to land with you.
It wasn't on my birthday, either, which ended up being a wonderful time with several of my closest friends in a waterfront home here in the northwest. It hit me a few months after I crossed that line, approaching me with a quiet, heavy presence, surrounding me like the depths of a coastal fjord on a windless evening. It wasn't intense or nervous, not worrisome or edgy, just dense and flowing. And that movement is what differentiated it positively from so many other seasons of rumination.
Forty? Where did it all go and what do I have to show for it? This age, also, held a certain added sting and poignancy for me because of how much of my thirties unfolded. It had been a decade which began so promising on just about every front, in work and income, in creativity, and in my relationships. While I navigated my share of problems like anyone, several important sections of life seemed like they were primed for continued growth.
A Sudden Change of Direction
Then, it all decided to bank hard abruptly and toss me off the side of the trail I was on. Promising relationships moved suddenly like pieces in a game of speed chess. Then work and finances answered the come hitherto flirtations of a brick wall. It was health that laid the traps. I found myself dealing with multiple trips to the hospital and what eventually revealed itself as a new and chronic health condition.
It forced me into an on again off again state of partial or complete disability, daily struggle, and significant financial strain. I think forty would have ended up far more inviting, or at least neutral for me, if my thirties hadn't seemed so violently upended by external forces. The thirties were a time of considerable internal growth and learning, but just the opposite with anything external. I felt that I'd learned a lot but could not do a lot, that my connection to the world in several areas had been severed and my hands tied. For me, forty, it turns out, was not just the celebration of a milestone year or a trip through nostalgia, it was a funeral song for my thirties.
A Season of Questions
Thankfully, I'm not the man I was in my late teens and twenties, full of life but plagued by insufferable self-doubt. Still, for about a year following my birthday, these things swirled around inside. What does this age mean to me, in relation to the choices I have made, and equally, the ones I've avoided? What and how did I feel about my place in the world? Was there peace to be found there? Or was my digging only going to uncover discomfort, regret, even sorrow?
Much of what I felt was quite nuanced, layered in ways not easily explained. It seemed a beautiful but painful combination of fluttering, brief encounters with satisfaction, even ecstasy, buffeted by a much larger and stronger sense of loss, a kind of thinness where density should have existed. I wanted so badly to make sense of certain things in my life that never seemed to resolve, and others that bloomed brightly only to then be scattered to the four winds like the seeds of a dandelion. And though it is a tragedy, live long enough and regret becomes a familiar song. Perhaps the loudest one many of us hear.
Yet, in all this exploration and mourning, I began to take note of something else I'd not expected, namely serenity and acceptance. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not talking about resignation and apathy. Self-annihilation by way of self-delusion is not on my menu. I still have a great many goals and dreams I aim to accomplish, so many trials to overcome, so many people to love, serve, and inspire. But at some point, you have to sit down and break bread with all the realities of your life, especially the ones that haunt you the most. Eventually, you have to make peace with certain scars that will never fully heal.
If you want to find a level of success and satisfaction still in a handful of areas but don't want to be tormented by many of the things that fueled you, quite powerfully, but so destructively in youth, you have to loosen your grip on the world, on existence itself. Our time here is rarely easy, and to be honest, human life is a lot more struggle than celebration. But gripping everything so intensely within our fist won't concentrate life, and it won't fix it.
“Much of this process [of intense analysis] may help me to explore, create, and write in certain ways, but it also exhausts the soul. To understand something is not the same as coming to peace with it. Finding out how it works is not the same as digesting and integrating it into your life. ”
It won't increase the power and meaning of our experiences. It just makes them more difficult to see clearly and to weigh accurately. It also renders them even more painful when they don't work out the way we'd hoped. Control is a shaky concept at any stage of life. We have self-discipline, knowledge and wisdom, creative thinking, hopefully a smattering of objectivity and good planning. But the rest is up to the innumerable variables of chance and life's increasing complexity.
A Little Clarity
It took me years to realize that the main reason I held so many things so tightly was because I unconsciously believed I'd lose them if I didn't. While it stemmed from a host of experiences, much of this feeling likely started growing in me almost from birth, as my beautiful mother suffered from an unwavering terminal illness from the time I was born, one that stole much and eventually all of her ability to engage or remain present with us. It took her ability to speak, to walk or move, to share in the joys of conversation or even the basic activities and simple joys of daily life.
For a long time I'd thought it was merely related to an intensity that I often hold inside, something that comes natural. I do have a certain penchant for concentration, for distillation, an innate desire to get down to the marrow inside the bone. And it was interesting to finally hear someone else talk about it. Years ago, my friend Andy surprised me when he commented on this.
My father and I were part of a poetry and literary group at that time and Andy used to show up to read once in a while. One evening, after I'd presented one of my poems during the open-mic session, Andy told me how much he'd enjoyed the work. But he also explained how it clued him into something he'd only felt subtly before that night, that I thought and wrote with a kind of lucid but heavy intensity that rarely came up for air, that often, my poem was unrelenting in its pursuit of certain truths.
While on one level this was flattering, it also clued me into my own cognitive and emotional process that much more, a process that often does as much damage as it does a measure of good. I'd known it existed in my creative work and in my desire to understand the world. But how has it affected me in the other parts of my life? In my relationships? In my goals? As a father? In my own spiritual well-being? Much of this process may help me to explore, create, and write in certain ways, but it can also exhaust the soul. To understand something is not the same as coming to peace with it. Finding out how it works is not the same as digesting and integrating it into your life.
Everything’s Got to Move
Life is too slippery to hold with such force. It's like a living animal, only sticking around when we let it move about freely. While some of the most beautiful and excellent things in our time here continue to grow as we age, so long as we pour into them, human existence cannot escape its transitory nature. It cannot get away from its painful and unapologetic relationship with impermanence. Despite what many have said, there are a few things that do last. But they do not remain the same.
Everything and everyone changes, even when we try not to. The only way life perpetuates, the only way existence continues is by the process of change. Some things grow and become more a part of our lives, but they will not be the same as when we first discovered them. Still others, even when we try hard to keep them close, depart with little explanation. And we are left with the difficult work of not simply coming to terms with the loss, but figuring out exactly what the experience meant for us, what it continues to mean as it colors and shapes our understanding of ourselves and our future decisions.
The Good Work
The only way to do this work successfully is by valuing honesty with oneself, by remaining open to the truth of our lives, both in the choices we’ve made and their consequences, and with the many things that rush in that we have no control over. You have to be willing to negotiate with uncomfortable truths. This doesn't mean that you agree with them, that you like them or believe they were even necessary. But you have to find a certain level of rest in things that cannot be undone, with words that cannot be unwritten.
You can mend certain things. You can reconcile broken relationships. You can always create a new business, start a new band, record a new album, visit that country you've always wanted to, read the unread books, connect with estranged friends or family members. Even so, experiencing or accomplishing any of these today, will not be the same as they would have been years before. This may actually be a good thing, since age often affords us a level of clarity and maturity we didn't have in youth.
How Do You Take Your Pain - Straight Up or With a Twist?
Even in wisdom, though, the sting of loss is present. Wisdom doesn't remove the reality of suffering, it brings context to it. In fact, wisdom and knowledge often increase our connection to suffering, the intensity in which we experience it, at least for a time. But wisdom affords us something that some psychologists refer to as "clean pain." This is pain that we process openly, honestly, without denying or repressing it. This is in contrast to the "dirty pain" that we bottle up, ignore, medicate, and quietly rage over. We are processing it, but that process is a kind of internal violence turned against ourselves. Repression and quiet, perpetual rage borne of sorrow, are soul-killers, things that hollow us out. And this internal storm is often too easily turned on others.
“Our attempt to grip and control is the unconscious pursuit of what you might call, an attractively presented death, an embalming method. Like killing a rare butterfly and pinning it to a board, in our mad obsession with holding everything so tightly, we drain it of life. It is an obsession with safety, with existence as still life, with the frozen image of a more pleasing existence instead of the reality of a more complex one. ”
Processing pain or loss cleanly, can be unfathomably difficult, but equally rewarding. This kind of pain actually moves, disperses, unlike the kind we hold tightly to. This is its strength, its ability to flow, to affect us and in some ways feed us, then thin out and become part of the landscape. This process mends us in places we didn't know were compromised. And it leaves us in a state of openness, of clarity and readiness to explore the next stages of life with a new curiosity and a surprising level of gratitude. This kind of healing only happens when we hold life with an open hand, when we view it as a living, dynamic thing, something we cannot and were never meant to completely control.
Beauty in a Box
Our attempt to grip and control everything is the unconscious pursuit of what you might call, an attractively presented death, an embalming method. Like killing a rare butterfly and pinning it to a board, in our mad obsession with holding everything so tightly, we drain it of life. It is an obsession with safety, with existence as still life, with the frozen image of a more pleasing existence instead of the reality of a more complex one.
Making peace with certain painful things isn't about blindly accepting everything as an inevitability, which is the harmful default position of anyone fixated on the ideas of fate or destiny. It's about a greater level of honesty with yourself and others, and accepting the reality of a life that will never be perfect. Life will continue to surprise us with new revelations of beauty, of grace. But it will not be shackled. It will not be pressed into the exacting mold we want so badly to squeeze it into.
The Deal
I have scars, many of them. And some of these run too deep to uncover completely. I have regrets and I have sorrow, and some things that I will never be okay with. But joy remains not separate from, but in the midst of these. The peace we find is not a thing apart, but something that lives among the pain, something that dwells in the same house and roams the same hallways. And as long as our relationship with struggle and loss is a living, breathing, moving one, we will always find life in this tussle. I'll leave you with the ending quote spoken by Anthony Hopkins as C.S. Lewis, in Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands. In its honest simplicity it says it all. I've never read an equal to it.
"Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal."