The Pros and Cons of Flying High

At the beach today a couple of kids were fishing off the rocks. All well and good – a pleasant scene on a beautiful fall day. After walking some distance past them, I heard one exclaim that he'd caught something. I turned my head and saw an 8 year old boy excited to have even the smallest creature dangling from his line.

"Can you get it off?" called his mother from her blanket on the sand.

"I think so," he said. A twinge of anxiety shot through me. Hoping he wasn't going to do what I did as a kid with fish on my hook, I continued up the beach and tried to think about something else.

The dock and the fish and my cousin Tommy came flooding back anyway. I think of this every so often, how each summer at grandma's lake house we'd drop our lines over the edge of the dock and troll for sunfish. Sunnies, we called them. They were easy to spot through the clear lake water. Mother sunfish liked to build their nests - light colored circles on the lake bottom - right alongside the docks, almost directly in the center of each boat slip. They bit fast and were an effortless catch.

But once caught, they were not always easy to unhook. Tommy knew how to get rid of the toughest ones. He showed me how to slide the fish between the wooden slats of the dock, rotate it perpendicular, and yank hard.

"What now?" I said, eyeing the entrails on my line. A strange feeling hovered on the edge of my awareness. I watched the body of the ravaged sunny, stunned and dying, as it sank to the bottom of the lake. We kept on fishing and, when we couldn't unhook them, leaving them for dead. This went on each summer until we morphed into teenagers and outgrew fishing and each other.

Because I am now an adult who cannot kill anything without wrenching remorse, these kinds of memories deeply disturb me. Due to the increased anxiety I have from immense midlife changes, they’re occurring more frequently. Moderate and minor stressors from the past have a new sting, long after I thought the toxins had worked themselves out. They bring me into harder contact with my ongoing existential despair – that of being merely human in an unfathomable universe, and of feeling guilty for our contribution to the destruction of our beautiful world.

It's nearly impossible to walk out your front door if you think too hard about these things. Anything we do has detrimental consequences in some form or another. The only way around it is to remember that we know how to create as well as destroy. And to remember that regardless of our actions, we are part of the natural world and the natural order of things. As with any natural phenomenon, we contain darkness and light. Our consciousness is another duality, for it is both a blessing and a curse to be aware of ourselves, what we have done, and what we can still do.

That is the high altitude view, and that's where I spend much of my mental time and energy. Away from the messiness of being human, of unsolvable dilemmas and pain. It's good to have the ability to go to thirty thousand feet, but it can also be an escape. I fear that I have spent too much time off the ground, because now comes a growing awareness that I must descend into the personal in a way I've never been able to. My body and psyche are sending signals that they're ready to deal with old issues, with trauma still embedded at a cellular level.

For this work I have to be willing to let ego and my small, little self take center stage. I have to acknowledge what it is and was like to be me, one inconsequential person among billions, and to act as if I matter. (Sure you're special. Just like everyone else.) To act as if my needs matter as much as the planet's. I am being asked to revisit what it really felt like being discounted, yelled at, smacked, ignored, or made fun of those times when I tried to explain it away or shrug it off. I need to go to the narrowest view, to think of only myself. This in service of breaking up the stuck energy that has manifested as a chronic, low grade, agitated depression since teenhood. At least, that is my hope.

Most people spend most of their time in this small place, as if life is about them, as if their eyes and egos show them reality, as if they know the universe. I have always been discouraged by this fact and proud that I can see past such short sightedness. But I often take it past discouragement to contempt. Perhaps it's a case of "protesting too much." Any extreme position is usually masking something not yet conscious.

Could it be that what I need most to heal is where I've least wanted to go my whole life? To go back and affirm my personhood at the most basic level? This is certainly what the psychological and spiritual texts tell us. It's not that I haven't tried. Now that I better understand timing – from that high altitude perspective - I know you can't hurry acorns into oaks. I just want to make sure, being more conscious of aging and mortality these days, that I live long enough to see the treetops.