Avoiding the Holes

Chatting not so long ago with a friend who is struggling to overcome the twin addictions of self-loathing and alcoholism, she announced that she had resigned herself to never being able to fully recover. To which I blurted, “But why would you wish to recover in the first place? What is it that you want to return to?”

In other words, to ‘recover’ is to make every effort to get ourselves back to that place from which we first spiraled, that place that made us so damned unhappy. It is the very definition of recidivism, to get back to the old gang, the job or mate or home life that sent us over the edge.

It’s one of those oddities of the human experience that when we fall we race to get back up, to “get back on the horse” and I suppose prove our mettle or courage or inner fortitude. It rarely occurs to us just to lie there and reconsider the whole thing.

Standing in my mother’s driveway nearly five years ago to the day of this posting, I was about to embark on a self-prescribed “Vision Quest” in the canyons of Utah and doing a terrible job of allaying the fears of my mother who, for as long as she could remember, had watched her son engage in the most self-destructive of behaviors. How was she to know this was not a continuation of the same misguided thinking? But then came the words, with a clarity of purpose that surprised even me: “Mom, it has to stop here. I don’t want to pass down to my kids the same unhappiness and depression that seems to be a way of life for us all.” In other words, I wasn’t interested in going back to a life that had so often left me and, it seemed, everyone I knew, miserable.

As Rupert Spira says, the genuine spiritual journey most often begins with the profound realization that life is never, ever going to deliver any lasting happiness or peace. Most of us will suffice to ride the ebb and flow, the highs and lows, but a few will eschew “the sins of the fathers,”  draw a line in the sand and declare, “Enough!”

A man who gives premarital advice to couples said he cautions his clients to beware the human habit of marrying a man or woman who most resembles the parent who failed to give us what we needed as a child. Most of them ignore this advice, he said, because they’ve convinced themselves that they’re “in love” and “where there’s love there’s a way.” And so, he said, it’s “off to the wars” where they find those lifelong wounds reopened again and again because, lo and behold, the new ‘parent’ is just as unable to fill that hole as the original parent who created it. We are, as it were, unconscious gluttons for punishment. Which is precisely why we buy into the Hollywood schlock about finding a mate that “completes us.” We want desperately to believe that someone or something “out there” has the answers.

Speaking with my teenage daughter once about my failed marriage with her mother, I told her we married believing the other was going to give us something that we desperately needed, never once stopping to consider that the incomplete person is by definition unable to ‘complete’ someone else. The blind leading the blind and all that. “You’re best bet for a happy marriage,” I told this beautiful child who, like all children, has inherited some hefty baggage from her parents, “is to first work on making yourself complete.”

There’s an old saw about a man (or woman) who walks down a path and falls into a hole. With enormous effort he clambers out. The next day he walks the same path and falls into the hole again. The day after that he very gingerly walks around the hole. The day after that he chooses a different path.

For most of my life I fell into the same hole over and over and over again. And then one day when the blackness and pain of life in that damned hole was about to pinch off any hope for escape and swallow me up once and for all, it finally occurred that another path was required. Standing there that sunlit day five years ago I wrapped an arm around my poor nerve-wracked mother and said, with a wisdom that clearly was not mine but for which I am forever grateful, “There’s got to be a better way.” And there was.