First: get to safety

Saturdays are for the soul

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This is a 12 minute post. More if you go slow!

This week turned out to be a lot about intention, and the ways it can explicitly, or less obviously, direct our use of energy. I’m pulling apart the ways I tend to react to challenges (with less thought and more habit) with who I’d rather be: someone who is getting up in the morning and preparing for challenges. You know, the whole “choose your hard” thing.

I’d like to have chosen my hard, and be doing it, instead of having no idea what sort of hard will hit me, and basically doing a “duck and cover and defend and retreat” sort of life.

However, and this is a big however, we all know that the range of choice in life is entirely different person to person, and even day to day, for any one person. Choice is an aspect of freedom, but most of us are making fewer choices in a day than we’d really like. There’s an awful lot of non-negotiable “stuff” to do, most days, most hours, most decades of our lifespan. Trying to pretend otherwise is just unrealistic. So I can say that I want to “choose my hard” or “follow my heart” or “chase my dreams” or all sorts of happy clichés that look good on Pinterest, but that’s after: making rent, or a mortgage, a car payment (this is Saskatchewan - public transit doesn’t get you that far), insurance, gas, groceries, and skating lessons for the kids. Etc.

One choice tends to both add new and different options to one’s life, as well as shut other doors firmly, sometimes forever. So it’s nice to have the ability to make choices (freedom!), but this freedom comes with its own self-limiting, gradually narrowing structure of slow constraint. No matter how “free” I try to be, the minute I use that freedom to do anything in particular, I’ve limited my future freedom. There’s no getting around this aspect of life, without starting out by choosing (and doing) nothing at all - which is of course the highest level of confinement possible.

So there you go. We all make some choices, and those choices make other choices for us, and on we go.

What I’m trying to get at is that there are no people living without hard constraints. It’s the nature and character of those constraints that may seem more or less comfortable. We all know how Princess Di fared, and she’s not an anomaly in the experiences of the rich and famous and beloved by the masses. Her “hard” was different than mine (and frankly, I wouldn’t want it, no matter how many castles and dresses and crowns and trips were thrown in).

The seduction of power, and even power to do good, seems to have pulled many people into politics or other forms of leadership, and how many end up slowly selling their souls to maintain their position, still pretending they are in it for some noble cause?

The beautiful people of Hollywood may be happy at times, but they certainly are not able to live life without constant scrutiny, judgment, and commentating on any aspect anyone wants to poke a finger at and talk about. Again, that’s not a hard I think I’d survive.

Broad socio-economic circumstances aside, there are other factors that hit us unexpectedly, and without much respect for class or race or gender or position…cancer, war, pandemics, tyranny, crime, heartbreak, sudden death. We’re none of us immune to any of that. And a lot more. Our loved ones can get hit hard and we’re out, no matter how well we prepared our own game plan. Vulnerability is the most acute when we love other people, as any crime writer knows. As any parent knows.

So I just want to be clear, when I talk about setting intentions, and the work of the soul, and choosing, and all that, that I’m not talking about this in the realm of academic, foofala bullshit. I know that you don’t wake up in the morning and have an hour to thoughtfully and calmly plan out most aspects of your upcoming day or week or life. No. You are woken up, and you struggle to transition to a high enough level of alertness to deal with three problems left over from last night, as well as six or eight that seem to be coming together nicely before work. And that’s not counting trying to eat a nutritious breakfast.

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Maybe, maybe you can do what I’ve most often tried to do: get up earlier than everyone else so as to build in that hour. And that works as long as it doesn’t cause a chronic sleep deficit, which means you need to go to bed early enough to pay for that morning time to get ready. And going to bed early means (for me, historically), leaving some stuff undone, which means I start to gradually get behind, and pretty soon the whole weekend is about catch-up, and those early mornings are wonderful but not really enough to capture the big picture problem of not enough resources for the life I’m trying to create.

And this is the level of intention-setting I’m most familiar with: how to find a way to adjust a life that is somewhat adjacent to what I previously intended, but is still costing me more than I’m able to invest. No particular crisis, just a feeling of almost imperceptible movement towards a classic burnout scenario. And no off-ramp in sight.

Trying to change a set of constraints and opportunities that feel like gradually accruing credit card debt is its own one hard thing, and I’d like to give you my two cents about that one; namely, it’s not good. Even though it’s not really bad, it’s also not good. And it’s not safe, or more specifically, safe enough, to justify going on.

It might be good (if this is your life) to use the absence of a clear and present crisis to make some hard choices proactively, because there is all sorts of likelihood that even a small wrench thrown into your plans at this juncture will be so unsustainably impossible to deal with (given your slowly accruing debt load) that more aspects of your life could crumble suddenly and with very few choices available.

That’s been my experience, anyway.

Okay, so, unsolicited advice aside, intentions. How to set them? How to help our souls do this oh so important work of not only setting intentions, but placing them in an order that works, and doesn’t confuse the heck out of our hearts, and minds, and long-suffering, highly realistic bodies? And, as I’ve explained, this is our soul building a plane while flying it. So if it’s…tricky? Don’t beat yourself up. There’s no easy way that I can figure out. Probably the only easy way would be to not even try, and numb oneself to the consequences…Been there. Done that. Doesn’t work.

Here’s an idea. Instead of starting out by envisioning where you want to go, what you want to do, and who you’d like to be, as if you are entirely unconstrained and can think your way to those heights of fantasy (which is actually one of the ways I’ve numbed myself repeatedly to reality), how about allowing yourself to start precisely where you are, and take your current “hard things” into account?

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For me, this is basically the process of stopping my energetic drive towards a highly valued “goal,” planting my feet, turning 360° around, and specifically looking (do it, Lynn!) squarely at all the stuff I’ve put into my “shadow.”

I’m not a psychologist or psychoanalyst or even trained in cognitive behavioural therapy, but I do know that there is stuff I’d rather not think about. So much stuff. And the reason…well, a reason I’d rather not think about so much of it, is that I think that stuff will tell me what I don’t want to know. Limiting me. Ugh. Hate limits. Don’t like them. Maybe if I run a bit faster…?

Nope. Sobriety is my virtue, the reward for any hard work I do to dismantle my reflexive patterns of unconscious reactivity. Sobriety, for a 7, is a very beige sensation. Very earth-toned. Not shiny at all. Almost…muddy.

But grounded. There is that. And the payoff, which has taken me a lot of disciplined “stay with it” sort of energy, is a surprising one. It’s the ability to move slowly, with real strength, and to stop when one gets even a little nervous. This sensation - slow forward progress, at the pace of keeping faith with all the parts of me - is not as torturous as I thought it would be. In fact, to my surprise, it’s a little…pleasant.

And the safety of it!

The injuries, fear, and crises that have NOT happened, simply due to my being “sober,” and present, and awake and aware, and responsive, rather than reactive?

Quite a few, by my private count.

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You don’t have to dive into the Enneagram universe to figure out that you may have some patterns tending to escape reality rather than living in it. And on the face of it, escape seems to be one way to get to safety. Except, and this is key, escaping a burning car crash is entirely different than escaping reality itself. The burning car crash is a bad aspect of reality. The sum total of What Is Happening all around? That requires (if you want to fight to live, that is) standing up and looking around and taking it in and basically being willing to register as much as you possibly can, before making any tactical decisions or actions.

(I bet there are none of you reading who thoroughly enjoy this part of being human.)

So I just wanted to write this particular investigation into how to prioritize one’s intentions when there’s no obvious beginning or end to the chaos one is in (the plane you are trying to fly, wrench in hand), with an emphasis on the common sense approach of defining the first objective: get to safety.

What is safety? It’s probably not a comfortable chair with a nice view and a fire in the fireplace. Not initially, anyway. Most likely, it is more like trying to climb a tree to get the lay of the land, and also doing a thorough body scan to make sure all one’s injuries are being looked after (because I bet you have injuries).

Sorry about the mixing of metaphors. I’ve been listening to the latest Hunger Games book and it’s leaking into my writing.

The problem with a life that is not terrible, crisis-filled, or obviously war-torn, is that we can adapt so easily to so much, and thereby slowly deteriorate in our standards for living, and our hope for meaning. I’ve done this for decades, and it’s taken me being thrust into a true crisis to find the courage to actually face my life as it really is (not as I kept wishing it would drift into) and admit to myself that I was not safe. I was not healthy. I was not providing for myself the means to grow, simply edging further and further into a state of chronic weakness and increasing distance from my own centre.

I think a lot of people have a similar story, and for that, crises can be thanked. They do have a clarifying effect. It’s just that they also are really quite awful to live through. Wouldn’t it have been so much nicer if I’d taken the opportunity to do this whole thought process when I had far more choices still available, and also far more residual resources at hand? Sigh…I didn’t. I adapted, normalized, rationalized, compartmentalized - and my self-worth eroded down and down and down. Because I was basically voting for a placating with fate, a compromise with eternity, a pass at fighting to live, in favour of…what? A status quo that appeared normal, made sense to a majority of onlookers, and (most tellingly) fit my narrative as to what my life was for.

I’m writing this thinking how many of us, who don’t routinely come up against life-altering crises and life-threatening enemies, can drift slowly into abusive, neglectful, or meaningless existences. Not because we want them, but because they don’t, on the surface, signal quite enough Danger to catch our attention, and marshal us to change course.

And so I return to the start of this whole conversation, which is where I described how hard it is to find the time to even set intentions, and how confounding the normal busy-ness of life is to that activity, and how even if I do get up early and try to think, it’s soon obvious that there are very few changes in direction that are not highly risky, and initially costly. Without a galvanizing “inciting event” in my story, it’s incredibly difficult to justify that sort of move.

But…are you safe? Are you defended? Do you have a home that has at least some of the qualities of a refuge? Is your current equilibrium one that assumes you have infinite worth, and are precious and unique? Do the people in your inner circle respect your home, add to it with their proximity, and invite you into theirs with no payment necessary or implied? Can you breathe, slow, deep, full, and whenever you need to?

Those are questions I think a lot about, now. Having come through a bunch of highly unwelcome challenges to my former equilibrium, I find myself having finally (finally!) raised the bar on creating a new one.

I want a safe enough home. I want to know when I’m in my home, and not in anyone else’s. I want my home’s physical, emotional, and mental climate to be ordered by me, and no one else. I want the ability to open doors, and shut them. I want space to rest, to think slowly, to build and rebuild strength that has been lost, to consider, and detach, and attach, and create. I want the ability to choose to love: not in order to get love, but because I am loved. I want to intend, nourish, access my energy, and then dare, savour, rest, and repeat.

I no longer think this is too much to expect for my own life, which is already short enough. I am voting for myself and my worth, one sober hour at a time.

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If any of this resonates, I encourage you to slow down before any particular course change. As I’ve tried to emphasize, there are no cheap decisions in life. Getting to safety could mean any number of things, but likely taking it slow is universally good sense.

Also, find a team. I have relied heavily on my counselor, my husband, my family doctor, my close friends and family, my EFW mentor and colleagues, lots and lots and lots of books written by people doing hard things, and willing to share, and of course, my animals.

Finally, start small, but start. Take a step away from normalized indifference to your own needs (or debt!), and have the courage to confront one hard truth about your reality - hopefully one that suggests one small change that could be the beginning of a journey that will eventually create large changes. There is nothing glamorous about the paper clip approach of trading in one object for slightly more valuable ones, but you know…it can work. I usually start by taking my vitamins and go from there. Sometimes, that’s it for the day. Sometimes, I can do a bit more. The point is, I acted in the real world in a direction in line with my intentions. The magnitude of the action is not quite as powerful as the existence of the action. At least, that’s what I need to tell myself most days.

One hard thing: First, get to safety. So you can balance your centre. So you can fight to live. Because you’re worth it.

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