I posted a link to an article that really resonated with a lot of people I know. It talks about the confusion of not having a set, clear path in front you, and how we often shape our lives by the decisions we’ve made in the past rather than our expectations for the future. It resonated with me too, which is why I posted it, but it also pulled at another issue I’ve wrestled with a lot in life: hope.
The article I’m talking about, When Way Closes is a short meditation on the frustrations of feeling like our lives are out of control, directionless, and pointless.
That’s a real condition; the thought “I have nothing to live for” hit me hard right before my major psychological breakdown in 2008. It was not a plea for death but rather a simple reckoning: there was no reason for me to get out of bed in the morning. Oh sure having a job and paying bills, yes, those responsibilities kept me going to that job I truly loathed. But personal reasons? Goals? Hope? Zip nada none. I was living mostly for the express purpose of staying alive. There was nothing ahead of me to live for.
Which was the result of both the choices I made and didn’t make. Either way, doors were closed and I moved on, forever trying to make things “better” in a way that did not involve any kind of personal risk, self-discovery, or lifestyle change. Oh, the irony.
I put all my bets on hopes I had for the future, but I did not want to do the work necessary to deal with my demons and my fears. The result was that I slowly pushed myself into a full breakdown that took a year and half to pull out from.
While I can say “I put myself there, I have no one to blame but myself,” I think it is also accurate to say, “I did the best I could with the resources I had at the time.” Both statements are equally true.
I always tried for better, and cornering myself into a nervous breakdown was definitely not done on purpose. I desperately grasped at ideas to improve my life, work, and career over and over. I made plans and I had goals and I worked my ass off. I ended up making poor choices and I misdirected myself plenty of times but it was always with the best of intentions. My strategies were flawless…except for the fact that they were also wrong.
So, “way closed behind me” and things changed whether I wanted them to or not.
The article talks about how, when we are confused about the future, we should look to our past. Doing that (post-breakdown, after-therapy) I realized that a lot of my bad choices were protective, keeping me out of environments/jobs that would have been psychologically horrific for me, despite the fact that I pinned all my hopes on those careers working out. Hind sight, ammirite???
I would craft plans based on hopes I had about results, then derail myself out of fear and insecurity and be confused about why that happened. I failed to realize that the plans were, themselves, flawed. Wash, cycle, repeat. Repeat and repeat, because hope is merely high-octane desperation.
Mostly, this cycle kept going because I thought as long as my path was clear and my goals concrete, I would not fail. Crashing and burning due to self-sabotage was never accounted for, even if I knew that was exactly what was going on at some level, even if I claimed bad luck or other people or the whimsy of fate. If only I could get it right! Yet, when I finally turned to look at how “way had closed” behind me, each time it was clear as day: blinded by hope, I would stumble onto a plan to improve my life, only to defeat myself out of self-defense, then sink into despair because my hopes had been dashed.
In reading Andre Come-Sponville’s book “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality” I was reminded of one of the great lessons of Buddhism: suffering is born out of desire.
Not, as we tend to define the word these days, desire in and of itself as a sexual or material craving. The desire meant here is far more along the lines of “hope” – we hope for what we do not have, and then fall into despair when we don’t get it or we get a corrupted version of our dreams. Suffering does not arise because human emotions are bad and we should dissociate from them, but from the hope we rest those emotions on.
Where things careen off the tracks, I think, is where hope lives.
While I’ve never been a big proponent of “follow your bliss” – I’m far too much a type A personality for that nonsense – I know that doing so is part of the secret of “finding way” (as the Quakers call it). But what are we to hope for if no part of our path is clear? What do we work towards?
The phrase that pulled at me from Comte-Sponville’s book was: “If we want only what we do not have, we cannot have what we want.” It’s a bit like a riddle but it’s also accurate. For example, those who are filthy rich tend to crave more and more money, no matter how much they already have. They are obsessed with hope, which feeds their greed. They will never have what they want, and in the end, turn craven in their desperation.
We tend to think that if we don’t have high hopes and a high-resolution path for our goals, then we are doomed to fail. I think far more often, putting our hope into exacting plans means that when things (inevitably) fail to go to plan, we end up completely disordered. Yet, maybe those plans were not actually well suited to our true goals. Maybe we suffer because of hope, not failure.
When way closes behind us, it does point us in the direction we were meant to go, but we still can’t get anywhere if we let the fog of hope cloud both our vision and our understanding of our past. It’s not about thinking, “well, the turn to the left is a closed door, therefore I must go right” but rather, “why is that door closed? How I can keep doors like it open? Should I?”
It’s not to say we should not have goals or plans, but perhaps we would be better served by looking at our future with the mindset of, yes, “follow your bliss.” That we should look at how “way has closed” behind us not as failure (the result of hope) but as lessons we created for our future selves. Or as Comte-Sponville also wrote: “The wise act, while the foolish hope and tremble.”
Basing all our plans on hope for what we don’t have is a recipe for disaster. Likewise, failing to plan is planning to fail. The point where these two ideas converge is where we look at how “way has closed” and understand our true motivations, wants, and needs.