Читать книгу: «How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life»

1 Digging Deep for Wisdom

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. —Wendell Berry

We begin with a story:

A man who always considered himself clever and capable died at the end of a long life and found himself on The Other Side, waiting for an interview with God. Time seemed to be nonexistent as he sat alone in a light-filled room with no ceiling, no walls and no floor, trying to adjust to his new circumstances and anxiously anticipating his upcoming meeting.

“What will God ask me?” he wondered. “I was never much of a deep thinker. What if he asks me about the meaning of life? I won’t know what to say. I could always tell the truth—I was too busy being successful to think about that kind of thing. After all, my accomplishments have been very impressive—even God should be able to see that!”

With intense concentration, he tried to recall all of the marvelous things he had achieved during his lifetime, so he’d be ready to talk to God.

Suddenly God appeared before him and sat down in the other empty chair. “It is good to see you,” God began. “So tell me, how do you think you did?”

The man breathed an enormous sigh of relief to hear that this was the question God was asking the one question he was sure he could answer. Feeling confident, he began: “Well, I thought you might ask that, so I’ve made a short list of my accomplishments. I wanted to own my own business and become financially successful, and I did that. I wanted to have a good marriage, and I stayed married until my wife passed away—fifty-two years! I wanted to put my two children through college, and I did that. I wanted to own a luxurious home, and I did that. I wanted to learn to play golf and break ninety, and I did that. I wanted to buy a boat, and I did that. Oh, I can’t forget this one—I wanted to donate money to worthy causes on a regular basis, and I did that.” The man felt quite satisfied with himself, hearing his own list. Surely God was going to be impressed.

“So in conclusion,” he declared, “I would say without wanting to sound immodest or anything, that I did very well, considering I accomplished most of the things I set out to do. But of course, since you’re God, you knew all of this already.”

God smiled kindly at the man. “Actually, you’re mistaken.”

“Mistaken?” the man asked. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re mistaken,” God repeated, “Because I wasn’t paying much attention to the goals you achieved.”

The man was taken aback. “You weren’t? But I thought …”

“I know,” God interrupted. “Everyone thinks the better their life went, the more successful their life was. But it doesn’t work that way up here. I didn’t pay attention to all the times you got what you expected and hoped for, for that wouldn’t teach me much about what you were learning in your earthly existence. I was watching you most closely during all those difficult times when you encountered the unexpected, the things you did not plan on or want to happen. You see, it is how you dealt with these that reflects the growth and wisdom of your soul.”

The man was stunned. He’d gotten it all wrong! He’d spent his whole life trying to do everything right. “How should I know what lessons I learned from life’s difficult moments?” he wondered in a panic. “I never even liked to admit I had any problems. What am I supposed to tell God now?”

For a moment, he was speechless, but never one for enjoying defeat, he soon got a second wind of energy. ‘Don’t just sit here!!’ he told himself sternly. ‘You never lost a negotiation on earth. Try again!” Gathering up all of his confidence, he began once more:

“Well, to tell the truth, God, I was just being polite before. Actually—and don’t take this personally—my life was hell! What hardships, what disappointments, what tests and trials! Let me tell you about the time my mother-in-law moved in with us for months. And then there was the time I passed two kidney stones—at once! And my youngest son, he was nothing but trouble. And my wife, don’t get me started on my wife or I’ll be here forever …”

“Take your time,” God replied. “I’m in no hurry …”

In one way or another, we are all like the man in my little fable. We do our best in life to get things right. We make lists, set goals, study, train, learn, commit to our relationships and our dreams, get organized, pray, affirm and problem-solve, hoping to experience the happiness and success we imagine for ourselves. Yet, inevitably, all of us arrive at times when, in spite of how steadfastly we have worked, how well we have prepared, how deeply we have loved, things still don’t turn out the way we thought they would. No matter how hard we try, we cannot plan for the unexpected.

Whether these difficult surprises come in the form of small setbacks, horrible shocks, or gradual, painful awakenings, the result is the same: We end up face-to-face with jaw-dropping moments of unwelcome revelation when we realize to our great dismay that we are living a life that does not look like the one we wanted. And unlike the man in the story, we are usually not so quick with a snappy comeback to the unexpected. More often, we are left shaken, disoriented and desperate for answers.

After two decades of writing, researching and teaching about personal transformation, I’ve come to the conclusion that so much of the pain, confusion and unhappiness most people—including myself—struggle with comes from our encounters with the unexpected, in both our outer and our inner worlds. Try as we might, these encounters are inescapable, an inevitable part of being human. Even though each of us secretly suspects that we’re the only one whose life is so off-course or inexplicably unsatisfying, and that everyone else is deliriously happy, the truth is something quite different: All of us are lifetime warriors in a prolonged battle—with change, with reluctant endings and scary beginnings, with assessments and reassessments, with more moments of disappointment than we care to count.

Recently I was going through some old notebooks I’d kept from college, and I discovered a page I’d written in my early twenties listing my personal goals and dreams. As I read the items on my life wish list, I was astonished by two things. The first was that I had indeed accomplished many of the goals I’d set for myself over thirty years ago: to become a published author, to move to California, to teach people about relationships and personal growth, to create a community of conscious people, to travel to exotic places around the world, to study with wise spiritual teachers, to fall in love and have a beautiful wedding, to own a home, to perform onstage, just to name a few.

The second realization I had as I read the items I’d included was more sobering. I became aware of how many unexpected things had happened to me that certainly were not on my original wish list. I had not written: Get divorced … more than once; be cheated by dishonest business partners; lose lots of money in the stock market; create alliances with companies that go bankrupt; Battle unfair lawsuit; brave slanderous attacks by jealous colleague; lose dear friends to cancer. I certainly didn’t remember setting these events as goals, yet they had occurred just the same.

Then it dawned on me—like so many of us, like the clever man in the fable, I had always believed my challenges would lie in overcoming the obstacles to my goals. But I was wrong. My deepest turmoil has had nothing to do with the things I didn’t get, but rather with the things I did not expect, and got anyway.

It is not the things we want and don’t get that are the source of our greatest tests and trials— it is the things we do get that we did not want and never expected.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” —J. R. R. Tolkien

Here is how it happens—you are going along with your life, minding your own business, when suddenly “it” hits you, and you are stopped dead in your tracks. What is “it”? “It” may be an event that forces you to pay attention to the realities of your life that you’ve been avoiding: the passionless marriage you pretend is better than ever until one day your husband walks out; the distant daughter you tell everyone is really doing fine until you discover the stash of heavy drugs in her drawer; the sixty-hour-a-week job you claim to love in spite of how exhausted you always are, until you collapse with a heart attack one day.

Sometimes “it” is loss—loss of love, loss of money, loss of trust, loss of security, loss of job, loss of health, loss of opportunity, loss of hope. Sometimes “it” sneaks up on you quietly, like a thick fog slowly rolling in over your life, so that nothing seems clear to you anymore and you feel lost. And sometimes “it” isn’t sneaky at all, but bold. You know “it” is coming—you can feel it breathing down your neck. Still, you tell yourself it will miss you, like those asteroids that hurtle toward the earth but never quite get a direct hit. But you are wrong. “It” does not miss.

“It” is whatever you didn’t want to happen, whatever you didn’t want to feel, whatever you didn’t want to face, whatever you didn’t want ever to have to experience. “It” is always unexpected, even when you’ve watched “it” approach every step of the way, because there is simply no way you can imagine that you will feel so scared or confused or miserable or disheartened or stuck or out of control—until you do.

I’ve concluded something else about the unexpected—it always seems to show up at the worst moment. Like a guest with horrific timing who, year after year, invariably chooses the most hectic weekend of your life to come stay with you, the unexpected has a knack for choosing just the wrong instant to arrive. Doesn’t “it” always seem to happen when you are already the most stressed, overextended and under pressure, when you have just announced that you cannot take one more thing going wrong? “I can’t deal with this right now!” you lament. “This is not a good time.” But let’s be honest—is there ever a “good” time for the arrival of unwelcome events, insights, or challenges? Of course there isn’t.

The unexpected is always inconvenient.

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.