Seeing Ourselves

A metaphor:

I’ve had a leather bag full of fear, hanging by a strap over my left shoulder for many years. I’d been collecting that fear since early childhood and it’s only gotten heavier and more cumbersome. It’s no wonder I’ve got a touch of tendinitis. The bag contains several pounds of: ‘I feel I’m not loved unconditionally,’ and even more of: ‘I always need always to appear brilliant so I can feel that I deserve to be loved’, and a whopping supply of: ‘I need to constantly achieve, lest I get left behind.’

Then there’s my suitcase, in which I carry fifty-plus years of insecurity, blame, and childish expectations of those closest to me. My palms are blistered from hauling it around. And on my head I wear an old felt hat, ostensibly to keep the sun off my scalp, but in truth, I wear it because in a hidden compartment in the crown, I carry a little ball of the very worst stuff; unappeasable anger.

Lately, I’ve noticed I’ve been transporting these things for no good reason. I’m not sure exactly what they weigh in total, but I do know that whatever the number is, it’s far greater than the pleasure they’ve given me for lugging them around for so long. In fact, I’ve come to realize they give me no pleasure at all. Perhaps you’re curious to know how it is that I hadn’t noticed this until now. I guess the answer speaks to one of mankind’s more exceptional qualities: The ability to forget.

Seeing ourselves

If we were able to recall our pasts with total clarity we would remember a time, way back in earliest childhood, when we weren’t dragging any of that emotional load. Upon remembering, it would be obvious to us that we had become packhorses for our own pain. But none of the pain-carrying happened suddenly; we started carrying the stuff slowly, little by little, over time, didn’t we? By the time we were fifteen or sixteen many of us had been carrying the burden so long that we’ve become inured to its weight.

Only in forgetfulness could we possibly come to the wrongheaded conclusion that our pain and anger were an essential part of us. Only through some spiritual amnesia could we been made to believe that letting this great and senseless cargo drop from our hands would somehow engender horrible consequences. It is strange, sad, and all too human, how we’ve come to almost cherish the ideas which are the most harmful to us; as if setting them down would feel like losing a limb.

What we are looking for is a blessing, a benediction through which we learn some great lessons about the world, and therefore, about ourselves.

There are two ways these "lessons "can happen; loss or joy. When tragedy strikes, it’s as though we find ourselves looking in a mirror. Only then can we see. We can see what we look like, what we have in our minds, and what we carry in our hands. And so too, when we experience some great joy, such as when we’ve been reunited with a long lost friend, or when we finally make a long-held dream manifest. We see ourselves in that same mirror.

Of course, we pray that these lessons come to us only through the latter, through joy. That may well be the nature of prayer. But the blessing, in either case, is that we’ll catch a glimpse of ourselves carrying all these needless and weighty things, things we hadn’t noticed before. What happens next will be effortless. Instead of believing that we need to cling to those painful things, we will see them for what they truly are, impediments to our happiness, and we will let them drop to the ground as effortlessly as we would drop a stone from our grasp.

Looking into that mirror, taking a view of ourselves that is long and vast, makes it far likelier that we will have the presence of mind to set our burdensome things down, once and for all — first the leather bag, then the suitcase, and finally, perhaps with just a pang of regret, the old felt hat.