I had a rough day this week.  It came out of nowhere, really.  I woke up and knew within a few minutes that an old familiar cloud was hanging over me…Churchhill’s black dog that used to hound me on a regular basis had come for an unexpected visit.

I hardly ever get depressed anymore.  It’s such a sweet relief after years and years of a cycling battle against despair and anxiety. When days come like the one I had a few days ago, I am made so much more grateful for the hope that has learned to float in me.

The thing about these days when I do get depressed is that it’s usually not rational; I can sit there and tell myself all day long that I’m not being rational, and that all is well, but it’s not always possible to talk myself out of places with logic and words.  I’m so very thankful for the people I have in my life that hang with me on the dark days that I do have, and remind me of truth and peace that seem a bit fuzzy and evasive to grasp at the time.

On this particular morning, I woke up missing my mom dreadfully. She and I had a complicated relationship, and we could bicker and pick at each other like nobody’s business, but she was my mom.  She was a constant that I had known for 33 years, a soft place of comfort, someone who always came back even after we had another stupid fight, someone who would shoot the bull with me on the phone and never fail to answer when I just wanted to chat or have a shopping partner.

Next came a wave missing of other people in my life that are now dead and gone.  The dreadful part about loving people deeply is that eventually they will die on you and then you have to spend the rest of your life with a terrible missing-them-ache in your heart.  I’ve been fortunate in this life to have loved deeply and been loved deeply by wonderful people, and many of them left me long ago….left me with many years to remember and miss them.

And finally, my dark day brought fear…not a sharp terror, but a dull blanketing ache of apprehension that everything was going to fall apart and I would be helpless to avert it. As I’ve written about before, the last three and a half years have been about me stepping out of all of my safety nets, trying to do brave things, trying to make up things as I go along while not really knowing what I’m doing, trying to walk on water.  On this day I remembered that I am only one person with alot of limitations, alot of things that I don’t know I don’t know, living in an uncertain world….and fear of losing everything rose up and threatened to choke me as I externally tried to look chill and calm while internally panicking, struggling to push the fear back down.

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Looking back with a little perspective, I was probably hormonal that day.  But hormonal or not, fear is fear and trying to rationalize your fear away with a “hormonal” label never works, and will usually piss off every woman when you tell her this even if she knows it to be true. But I made it through the day, got some sleep, and the next morning the cloud had lifted and the fear had abated, and in its place I found joy and peace and quick laughter again.  Thank God for the recalibration and recentering that can happen with a good night’s sleep.

I’ve been reflecting on how I felt that day, processing it, wondering where it came from, and considering how I can avoid days like that in the future. Days where you’re holding your breath, afraid that the other shoe is about to drop.

Then it occurred to me….something that feels like truth to me that I’ve never consciously thought out before:  the other shoe is inevitably going to drop, but it’s going to be OK.

Most of us spend so much time trying to build security around ourselves, whether it be material goods, wealth, or people that will stand with us for the long haul.  And then we spend so much time and effort worrying about how to keep them.  Our lives become about building and building, amassing and amassing….it’s not even necessarily about gaining luxury and comfort, but just trying to construct life bubbles that make us feel safe and not alone.  We in the Western world are extra great at trying to build these big, safe, static lives where we get to a place of security and then try to brick off its boundaries so it will always be there.

But this is such an illusion, such a cause of extra suffering for us when we try to blockade ourselves off from what “could” happen, when we try desperately to avoid losing what we value, when we dread the potential end of all those things our identities become wrapped up in.

Who will we be when we lose that job or career?  How will we survive if that particular person dies or leaves us? What if our external world crumbles and we have nothing extra special to differentiate ourselves from everyone around us? What then?  What will become of us? Will we simply slide off into an abysmal forgottenness?

I honestly think that one of humankind’s greatest fears is that of nihilism or irrelevance. We are afraid of losing ourselves and becoming unseen, and we unconsciously fear this happening when we lose the external selves that we have worked so hard to create over our lifetimes.

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Buddhism teaches us that all things are impermanent and passing. In fact, so many of the things we believe to be solid and stationary are really just illusions. Everything exists in relationship to each other; quantum physics shows us this, with atomic particles all moving in space and time around each other. Isn’t it remarkable that the specific combination and proximity of the right kinds of atoms and molecules with these relational particles can somehow create a chair that will hold us up?

I think one of our greatest shortcomings is to strive endlessly for perfection…perfection as in a static state where nothing goes wrong and there’s no pain and nothing will ever jump out and surprise us. I grew up believing this is what heaven is supposed to be like, and I remember thinking that it sounded as boring as hell and I might as well just exist as a fork if that’s what I had to look forward to.

As much as we hate to admit it, joy and peace and thankfulness are functions of a greater whole, a bigger picture….where the dark and loss and constant change are necessary. Otherwise, “being” would be flat and shapeless, and probably not worth having.

I think a better way to define perfection is not the goal of reaching a blissful, unchanging realm of existence…but rather, a state of “wholebeing-ness”, where we are always fully where we are, knowing that each moment will pass and change into something new and different, and that fundamentally we are still there, still loved by whatever it was that created and is still creating us, and that we will be well.

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If you stop and think about it, the shoe is eventually going to drop at some point….we just don’t always know when that point is.

Find the love of your life….you’re going to lose them at some point.  They may walk out on you tomorrow, they may die of cancer in five years, they may outlive you and die of a ripe old age.  But, you’re going to “lose” them at some point. Or, they will lose you first.

Build the perfect career and gain a stellar reputation in your field.  Write books, publish papers, dazzle audiences with your charisma.  It will all eventually fade away and at some point, you will be laid off, or some other bright and smart youngster will come up with greater ideas and your accomplishments will no longer seem so glorious, or you will reach the age where retirement looms and you are too tired to trudge into work each day. You will eventually “lose” your vocation and career.

Build a big house; it may burn or be hit by a tornado or be foreclosed on. Or your toddlers will render it an unlivable shambles.

Have children and raise them the best you know how: they may move states away or refuse to speak to you or become so absorbed in their lives that they forget to call.

Save all your money for travel after you retire and then receive the dreadful diagnosis that suddenly drains that travel bank account dry before you’ve stepped foot on the tarmac to fly off to an exotic location.

Have amazing beauty, or athleticism, or sex appeal and charm:  we’re all going to get old or ugly at some point, and no measure of lotions, creams, or exercise will save us from all that telomere shortening and DNA fraying and cells deciding they’re too tired to keep replicating.

The shoe IS going to drop at some point, and the things we don’t want to happen are going to happen. I just can’t see any other way around it.  Where we run into certain trouble is when we try to convince ourselves that we can avoid the shoe-drop, or that we can control it and postpone it to our liking. We can’t…and attempting to do so just causes us fear, and stress, and suffering.

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It feels increasingly clear to me, as illuminated by my black dog day this week, that most things are pretty much out of our control.  This could seem scary, but I think if we reframe it, it might seem better.

We don’t have much control over the hard things that come into our lives, but when you think about it, we don’t really control the good things that come into our lives, either….yet those good things still come.  We are also so quick to label everything and every event that comes our way:  this is good, that is bad, I like this, I hate that.  We look at individual data points instead of overall trends. This shortsightedness and rush to draw conclusions doesn’t serve us so well.

I can look back on so many times in my life where something didn’t go the way I wanted, and I thought it would be better to just lay down and die because life had passed me over.  And then, down the road a ways, I would look back and thank the sweet Jesus that I hadn’t gotten what I wanted in that moment…or I could see so clearly how that terrible moment had brought me to something so much better now, or had grown me into a bigger and better person.  Sometimes….sometimes….what we need most is for that shoe to drop.  Sometimes the shoe drop is the vehicle that can carry us forward into the joy and peace and new life that we didn’t once think possible.

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There’s a great parable that makes the point that we should be careful to label what happens in our lives as blessings or curses.  My experience has shown me that this tale is true.  The version I found was from Max Lucado, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard similar stories from Buddhist writers, too. Here it is:

The Old Man and The White Horse

There’s an old parable about an old man and his white horse. In this parable, the old man has a beautiful white horse. He could sell it and amass a large fortune.

The old man chooses to keep it in a stable and never sells the horse, His neighbors think he is crazy, telling him that there will come a day the horse is stolen and the man will have nothing.

That day came. Waking up one morning, the horse was not in its stable and was nowhere to be found.

The man’s neighbors were right all along and they rushed to tell the man he was now cursed because he had lost everything.

The man’s response is profound: “Don’t speak too quickly. Say only that the horse is not in the stable. That is all we know; the rest is judgment. If I’ve been cursed or not, how can you know? How can you judge?”

The people were offended by what the man said. “How can you say this?” they asked, “it is clear that you are cursed no matter what your perspective might be.”

The old man spoke again. “All I know is that the stable is empty, and the horse is gone. The rest I don’t know. Whether it be a curse or a blessing, I can’t say. All we can see is a fragment. Who can say what will come next?”

What a fool the neighbors thought.

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After several days the horse returned, he’d not been stolen, but ran away. On his return, he brought with him a dozen wild horses.

Now the neighbors had to come out to tell the man that he was right all along and in fact, he’s a blessed man because now he has a whole herd of horses.

The man responds again: “Once again, you go too far. Say only that the horse is back. State only that a dozen horses returned with him, but don’t judge. How do you know if this is a blessing or not? You see only a fragment. Unless you know the whole story, how can you judge? You read only one page of a book. Can you judge the whole book? You read only one word of one phrase. Can you understand the entire phrase?”

The man’s neighbors found it hard to argue with this. “Maybe he’s right,” they said. But deep down they knew the old man was wrong. He had one horse now he has thirteen — how could he say he isn’t blessed?

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The old man had a son — his only child. The son went to breaking these wild horses when one of them flung him off, landing he broke both of his legs.

The neighbors were awestruck at the man’s wisdom. “He was right we were wrong,” they thought. The old man, being too old to do much on the farm, no longer had his son available to work the land. With no one tending the farm, he would likely lose his income.

Not long after this, a war broke out in the old man’s country. All young men were called up to serve in the army where most would perish, leaving many fathers without their sons.

This was true for the old man’s neighbors who had sons that were to never return home. They went to the old man weeping, “you were right, we were wrong.”

“Your son’s accident is a blessing and while his legs are broken you will have many more years with him,” they said, “We will not, our sons are gone. You are blessed, we are cursed.”

The old man responded once again: “It is impossible to talk with you. You always draw conclusions. No one knows. Say only this. Your sons had to go to war, and mine did not. No one knows if it is a blessing or a curse. No one is wise enough to know. Only God knows.”

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I think the whole point of the parable above is that the best way to live life is to take what comes to us, accept it, and stop our incessant labeling of every, single thing that happens.  This certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t grieve the hard things we face (and I have more thoughts on this in a future post), but we cause ourselves more hurt when we insist that we know how life is supposed to be all the time.  We DON’T know.  Our lives are so infinitesimally short; we are a blip on the cosmic timeline, and REALLY, what do we know and truly understand about all the great and unimaginable things going on all around us in our galaxy and beyond.

Finally, I think we have to learn to go inward as well as very far outward to know that we are OK when our shoes drop. If we only look at our lives with what our five senses can perceive, it can seem terrifying and difficult, cruel and often pointless. It can feel like nothing and nobody is in control, and the whole world is just a goddamned mess.

This is where we must learn from the mystics, those who have different eyes to see. The mystics are the ones who have survived the shoe drops and can tell us what lies on the other side. When my soul is in distress, I turn to Rumi again and again for comfort, to remember how to see things in a new way when my physical eyes are burdened with all the pain, unfairness, inequity, and grief that people are experiencing around me.  I love these words….these are soul words:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”

Let the shoe drops come; don’t fear them, don’t fight them, because we don’t know what lies on the other side; we can’t say if we will encounter a blessing or a curse. What we have is now, and now, and now.  I, for one, want to enjoy the hell out of each of my now’s, catching and releasing, and resting in that field where we don’t have to label every single thing and we don’t even have to understand every single thing.  We are just free to be, and be loved, by this life that keeps bringing itself to us, day after day.