WillSpirit

Yesterday my post took too much time to tell a story too far off-topic; the main subject is meant to be behavioral health. Even though life-history, spirituality, and psychology overlap, I plan to keep mental health the central stream. Yesterday’s final paragraph said what the entire memory/story had been driving toward: remember how excited we were as youths? Wouldn’t it be nice to regain some of that passion? Even if it also meant making some silly mistakes? Or taking some risks?

Not long ago I concluded that to a large extent, for me, fulfilment depends on passion. Life begins to look dull and pointless when everything feels lukewarm. There needs to be an occasional volcano, or some lightning storms, or comets racing across the sky. Maybe feeling a lava flow’s heat scorch my face, or listening to the roar of a tornado from across an abandoned field would do me good. Over the past decade, my mental health clinicians inculcated me with a sense of fragility. Last year at this time friends were going on a trip to experience three-day ‘vision quests’ alone in the high desert. My therapist and psychiatrist convinced me that doing so might make me depressed. Wouldn’t want that.

But what if I had taken the challenge, and then became depressed? Couldn’t I have learned from that, just like my ‘manic-psychosis’ in 2000 brought me ecstatic spiritual enlightenment? The time has come to quit handling my psyche like a wounded dove, and let it step forth as a muscular mountain lion (we have those around here), alert and voracious.

Today’s post extends the theme a little further. It is not as short as I’d hoped, but it completes the diptych. Having made the point that hazards are the price we pay for feeling the thrill of life, I now walk myself back to when I stood in the currents of danger, and gazed at death’s face. Yesterday’s post laid the groundwork for this closing anecdote. Here is the stage setting:

Now for the story: After we reached this area above the falls, I noticed many people were camped on one side of the river, and none on the other. It seemed sensible to me to cross the flow, and set up our site away from the masses. I looked for a place to traverse, and settled on a spot where the stream widened to forty or fifty feet (12-15 m), but was only about four to six inches (10-15 cm) deep. At this location the water was sliding down the face of a hillside of solid granite. The expanse of ash-colored rock looked as big as a hockey rink, and formed a steep grade as it leaned against the mountain. Its surface dipped slightly in the middle, forming a shallow depression where the river spread out to became a flat, flowing sheet. Broad and smooth, the channel introduced no frothing or white water. All I saw was a layer of perfectly transparent water, moving quite fast, but only as deep as a full sauce pan. It looked like wading across would be no problem; the spot seemed like the perfect ford.

I led Paul to the place I’d found, and started to step in. Without explaining why, my hiking companion hung back and just watched. With no hesitation, I waded with confidence toward the other side. Not paying much attention, I made it ten feet (3 m) or so into the flow before realizing the hazards of my action. First, the granite surface felt almost as smooth and slippery as ice. My feet seemed ready to slide right out from beneath me. Second, the water carried far more force than I expected. Although the stream was only inches deep, my standing in the middle of the flow created an obstacle that brought forth the water’s hidden power. By blocking the current, my body caught the river like a sail catching gale-forced wind. A wave of boiling turbulence climbed my leg to mid-thigh, and I had to lean hard into this wall of water to keep it from knocking me over. It felt like a linebacker was slamming into my lower body. Finally, I looked downstream, and saw that this broad sluice ended at a jumble of angular boulders the size of compact cars. Huge flags of water sailed into the air where the river smashed into the rocks, and the roar sounded just like the waterfalls we’d passed coming up the trail. After crashing over the granite blocks, the water gushed into what looked like a small, deep lake. The surface of this icy body of water bubbled in whirlpools and eddies that spread away from the inlet. That I had not noticed the chaos and danger where the granite channel poured into the pool below shows how little I had thought through my plan.

With a sudden flash of clarity, I realized the danger of my situation. For the first time in my life, death stared at me with its frozen eyes. Almost like watching a movie, I could imagine my feet slipping out from under me, and could almost feel my hands claw at the glassy granite surface as I slid down its face at shocking speed. I felt the shove of the water driving me toward the boulders, and imagined my bones cracking hard against them. My head jerks against my neck like a doberman on a chain, my legs snap like dry sticks, and I fly into the water as if I were a bumblebee in the jet of a garden hose. I land face down, then writhe against my clothing and the icy water, trying to turn over. I am sinking and freezing at the same time. My arms don’t work right, and my jeans feel like lead blankets wrapped around my legs. I put every ounce of my waning strength into holding my breath, but my lungs are already screaming. After just a few more clock-ticks, I can’t hold it one more second, and against all my willpower my chest bursts, forcing me to blow out air, and suck in water. Ice-cold liquid floods my mouth then slams against my throat. My larynx clamps tight in a gagging spasm, and my chest heaves, both choking against the liquid, and wrenching in gasps for oxygen. Every muscle in my body cramps like twisted rope as my lungs fill with a column of cold, cold water. Then a kind of peace descends. In an oddly calm way I think, “So this is what it’s like to drown.” The screen fades, and then turns black.

As this imaginary scene flickered in my mind, I kept my body motionless, as if paralyzed. By leaning into the massive wave breaking against my lower body, and not shifting my feet by even an fraction of an inch, I was holding my footing. But how could I possibly get back to dry rock? I was no more than a quarter of the way across the river, so heading forward was not an option. I turned cautiously, looking to see if Paul had suggestions. He sat an a flat rock far away from me, looking in my direction but talking to a pair of young women who had their backs to me. I noticed some strangers watching my predicament, and moving toward me as they recognized my danger. But no one could help. Even if they’d had suggestions, I could not have heard them over the thunder of water blasting against rocks.

I had no choice but to back up. With barely perceptible shuffles, I crept my feet backward bit by bit. Time seemed to stop. My body ached with the tension of resisting the pitiless column of water shoving against me, at the same time as moving my feet and legs with surgical precision. I could not make the slightest misstep, or my hiking boots would lose their tenuous connection to the slick granite, and I would die. I knew this one fact with absolute certainty. At no time in my life have I been more aware of every muscle in my body. At the precipice of extinction, my mind had more connection to physical reality than ever before. Daydreams, distractions, future plans, regrets, and every other extraneous mental action left me. All was focused on moving just the right way to survive. For someone who has contemplated suicide with clock-like regularity, at that moment I was fighting for my life with every cell and particle of my being.

Have you guessed that I inched my way out of that situation without catastrophe? Maybe my predicament was not as dire as I thought. I have not been back to that area since, so perhaps the granite was not as steep as I picture it, the water not as fast, the boulders not as big. It does not matter. On that day I saw my death with the same clarity as I see the computer screen right now. At age sixteen, this was when I first met mortality. As should be clear from the story I told yesterday about chasing the bear, which happened that very night after my aborted river crossing, the need for caution did not sink in right away. In fact, I continued to make wild and risky decisions for a few more years. But the way was now prepared for me to some day ’settle down’.

I am quite settled. Domestic and cautious, I try to make careful decisions, and not wreck things by acting rashly. I made poor choices in the run-up to my breakdowns ten years ago, and that further cemented my anxiousness to avoid mistakes. Not that I don’t do stupid things. I can’t help it. But I do not take risks that I can forsee.

So the binary story of today and yesterday is now complete, and they arrive at more or less the same conclusion: I have learned to play it safe at the expense of simple play. I don’t let loose and just see what happens. I don’t ‘throw caution to the winds’, as exciting as that phrase always sounds to me. Dulling the knife-edge of passionate impulse may be necessary, but it is also sad.

Of course, there are those who refuse to get in line. They hang-glide at 15,000 feet. Or scuba dive deep into labyrinthine underwater caves. Or fly over rough dirt on motorcycles, hurling off jumps without looking first to see where they might land. Thrill-seeking probably brings that exact sense of death’s nearness that I experienced back at age sixteen, in the middle of a freezing river. That so many pursue such adventure shows the value of it. For my part, I am so cautious that violent accidental death is unlikely. More probably I’ll succumb to boredom. If I don’t change.

I don’t plan to take up rock climbing. The most dangerous thing I’m likely to do is hike around our house in the mountains near (is it really a coincidence?) Yosemite. Doesn’t sound too scary, except for the mountain lions. The cats have many deer to eat in this region, and being well-fed are not likely to attack adult humans. Still, I have to admit, it feels just a little thrilling to take the miniscule chance of getting eaten by a carnivorous wild animal. Perhaps that would be better than dying in a nursing home in thirty years. As I intimated in the story of the river, my first brush with death was also, in a strange way, my first contact with life. Just as you can’t see a white object unless you have a dark background, you cannot feel truly alive until you shake the hand of the reaper.

Death and life. Yang and Yin. They depend on each other, define one another. Death would have no meaning if nothing were alive. And life feels less significant when we lose touch with what makes this moment in history special. This instant, this second is ours, and there are only a finite number. If we lose sight of our ultimate fate, we risk devaluing our brief afternoon on this planet. How sad to spend a short life wanting to die, for instance. Death is not far, and obsessing about suicide makes no sense to me anymore. At age fifty, I finally ‘get it’ that my time is limited; until recently I had forgotten what those seething, frozen waters taught me at age sixteen. Suicide is a way of escaping life, but in a way, so is excessive caution. Right now, for me, risking more is a way of dying less.

This turned out longer than I planned. I also fear it sounds trite and obvious. I lay no claim to clairvoyance or unparalleled insight. All I know is that recovering my youthful zest for life seems vital to me right now. After ten years of fearfulness, introspection and self-pity, I want to recover bravery, a forward view, and self-confidence. The time has come to crack open the chrysalis, and emerge into the next stage of my adulthood. That requires stepping out of my protective shell, and into the heated embrace of fate.

(I modified this post on 2009 August 9, c. 06:40 PDT.)