Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (3 page)

Frustration whispers in the night of a kind of systemic discontent with our lives. Nothing is quite right, though, if we were forced to admit it, nothing is really wrong either. All we know is that we want something we’re not getting.
The frustration of it all lies in the fact that we’re sure we have a right to what we want. And we’re also sure that we’re not getting it because it’s being obstructed by something, someone who has no right to deny us.

We talk about it freely and we court it consciously. We speak of not being able to finish our work because the noise in the office frustrates us. Or the speed of the computer frustrates us. Or children playing in the yard frustrate us. Or—my father’s favorite—the sound of the vacuum cleaner at night frustrates us. A vacuum cleaner? A child? Office noises? A slow computer? Are these the things on which hang our lives’ content? Hardly.

The glory of frustration, of course, lies in its propensity to justify our own responses to it which, in turn, frustrate the people around us.

The desert monastics in the third century spoke of the inner struggle that gives rise to such spiritual chafing. “Tell me what makes a monk,” Macarius asks. And Abba Zacharias answers him, “As far as I can tell, I think anyone who controls himself and makes himself content with just what he needs and no more, is indeed a monk.” Is indeed, in other words, one whose life centers on what counts rather than on the temporary irritations of it.

The lesson is clear. Learning to be contented with what we have—and no more—escapes us. The ancients tell us that, to develop spiritually, we must discover how to control ourselves in the face of what we claim to lack but have no right to expect.

Without it, frustration obstructs us from being what we are meant to be—loving parents, good friends, partners,
holy participants in the creation of our worlds. Or, just as bad, it justifies our not doing what we are required to do—meeting our responsibilities, relating well to the people with whom we live life and doing the work the world needs to have us do. To claim to be frustrated in the midst of life’s normalcies only defeats our desire to be a fully functioning human being. And, ironically, we do it to ourselves.

And why would that be? The case is clear. Frustration is something that does not exist—except within the self. It translates my world to me through the filter of my own need to control it. Frustration becomes the space we put between ourselves and the world around us. It forgives us the effort to live well in a world where noise is a given and the nature of computers is to crash. And so it becomes the dark cloud through which we see our world. Worse, frustration is the very thing that smothers our joy in it and blocks our growth, as well.

The truth is that frustration is not about options, as if we have the right to create an environment independent of the needs of those around us. The very notion of it is pure chimera, a fantasy. No, frustration is about something outside ourselves, outside our grasp, to which we make unwarranted claim.

Frustration is a cover-up for something we have yet to face in ourselves. It lies in what we decide we have the right to demand from life rather than in concern for what life demands of us.

But it keeps us awake at night. It troubles our souls fretting about tomorrow. We lose sleep arm wrestling in our hearts with those whose own lives keep prodding us
beyond our willingness to go, to grow, to go on. And it is a delusion.

There is really no such thing as frustration, except in ourselves. We call frustrating anything we want the world to confirm as justification for being unable to control the way we think. It’s what we use to explain the sour or pouty or demanding or manipulative attitudes we have developed. It is the right we assert to be less than we are capable of being.

The paradox of delusion is that, if anything, the very act of putting trivia between us and the world is exactly a sign that we need to question what it is that is undermining our ability to function well in normal circumstances. When we allow the inconsequential to affect our ability to really be consequential in life, the question must be faced: What is really bothering us?

Is it a matter of being unwilling to admit what underlies the impatience, the despair, the anger? Are we frustrated with the computer or with the fact that our need to get a new one has been consistently ignored? Are we frustrated with the children who are playing in the yard because we expect the world to give us perfect silence or because we are unaccepting of the family from which these children come? Are we annoyed with the person next to us at work for walking back and forth outside our door or because they have the position we would really like? What is it in us that the frustration signals but no one has helped us to identify?

Frustration and the simmering agitation that comes with it, invading our nights and annoying our sleep, is
one of the dangerous spirits of the soul. It comes in the dark when we should be resting at peace with the world, in gratitude for the day, in hopes of an even more contented day tomorrow. To dispel it, we must begin to confront it in ourselves. It is time to identify the fires that drive our frustration if we are ever to come to know ourselves. It is time to decide whether such great unease is really worth our masking it in the paltry and the picayune.

Frustration is the signal that, indeed, something does need to change in our lives. But no one else can change it for us. Only we have the power to name it and to change it within ourselves.

Only then can we begin to rest in the arms of a God who stands by, ready to companion us through our confrontation with the self to the Spirit of Freedom that awaits us at the end of the journey to Truth.

Luigi Pirandello wrote of our capacity to fool ourselves: “ ‘Truth’ [is] what we think it is at any given moment of time.” A better look may, then, find in us a greater truth—that if we give up clinging to control rather than to possibility—life is good, creative, welcoming, and here for us to taste in many flavors.

Then trivia becomes only trivia. We discover every day that there are greater things to concentrate on in life than the niggling, ordinary, commonplace little things we so often allow to fell us. The task of the truth teller is first to unmask the falsities that lie within ourselves so that the full range of life is now freed to be seen. Only then are we in a position to really examine what is worth getting frustrated about.

The waves rolling in from the Atlantic today were high and white and threatening. Then, later in the day, the ocean was suddenly very quiet again, very much itself and at peace with the world. I couldn’t help thinking what a life lesson there is in that kind of undulation, in that kind of natural upset. Scientists call it the deposition of sand, gravel and sediment that comes from the recurring movement of the waves against a shoreline. It is storms, we see, that change and freshen and reshape the nature of the land.

It is a study in the movement of the human heart. No wonder we find it difficult to sleep at night as the ocean within us roars and rolls and carries us adrift from one place in life to another.

As I watched the waters crash against the headlands
and finally change from rough to smooth so clearly and so certainly, I realized that the whole scene encapsulates another one of the paradoxes of life. We spend our time intent on living constantly settled lives and call that peace. We are forever seeking peace and calm. At the same time, we forever forget—if we ever knew it—that peace is not a state of lifelessness. Life is not a lily pond; life is a bay inside an ocean. Peace is what comes to us after we negotiate the roiling, pounding waves of life lived one surge at a time.

When we roll and toss our way through a troubled sleep, it is so often about precisely that: how to meet the next wave crashing against our ordered, well-controlled lives. The question of why it is that nothing we do seems to enable us to get any kind of constant control over our lives rankles within us. We struggle against having to learn once more how to surf the features of the next phase of life and survive. We grasp for false calm at every turning of the day and call ourselves damned or cursed or burdened or beaten without it. And yet, if we were forced to live in the peace that is listlessness, we would die from the tedium of it all. We seduce ourselves into thinking that we like the lack of challenge. We forget how dull becalmed can be.

The strange thing is that we seldom stop to consider the value of the waves themselves.

The waves of life break into the center of our languor to remind us that the quality of our lives is not simply given to us, it needs to be earned. Life doesn’t come cut to size; it requires shaping. Life is the way we deal with it as well as the way we look at it. The waves of life—those subtle but
clear changes in old routines, or the established ambience, or social pattern, or daily practices—are designed to call our attention to the fact that underneath the apparently still waters around us, something is beginning to rumble and churn. Something is changing now. It is time to adjust, to cope, to grow again beyond our old stale selves. We cannot simply float through life forever.

Instead, every wave brings with it a new set of circumstances to consider. In our agitated sleep we know that we do not have the luxury of running away. We cannot, we know, simply ignore what’s going on around us as if it were all someone else’s problem. It will take its toll on us, we know. The shift in the neighborhood; the local election; the bank failures across the country; the growing violence in the streets; the derision of peoples unlike us; the suppression of women. It’s not a matter of clinging to the past now. In fact, there is no past now; there is only a present in the process of convulsion. Of spiritual tsunami.

Those who insist on preserving yesterday when today has already swept it away like sand on a beach lose the opportunity to guide the present. Rather they insist on resisting the present to the point that it simply fails to notice them anymore. It is a choice whether to run the risk of becoming part of a comfortable but insignificant cult in a society that is passing or participate in the efforts of a society that is rushing to regain its balance in a headwind of major proportions.

It’s important to remember in times of upheaval that high winds and great waves freshen life as well as threaten to swamp it. Everything new is not the end of the world.
Instead, it is the beginning of a new way of being alive that is based on the past but has already grown beyond it. It is too late now to stop the wave. It can only be absorbed and the beaches rebuilt to accommodate the changes.

Rogue waves are the dangerous ones; they are the ones that no one takes note of or prepares to manage. These are the movements we should have seen but did not. Or, worse, they are what we saw coming but refused to acknowledge in the hope that ignoring them would make them go away.

We do it in public life but we do it in our personal lives, as well. We deny the signs of a failing marriage, a job we don’t really like anymore, the anger of the children, our own loss of interest in everything that had once been the very center of our lives.

We are masters of it in the public arena. We assume that we can keep whole portions of society muted in the system and pay no price for that. We are certain that an ocean or two can go on protecting us from the reality of globalization. We ignore the growing tensions. We begin to take polarization in our government, among our citizens, in our churches for granted while underneath it all, the components of inexpungible change build up, crying for attention, pressing toward fulfillment.

In fact, every great moment in history has meant a shift in the tectonic plates of the last, the one that sat motionless for too long. And down deep we know the truth of it: Our sands are shifting now and no amount of willing it were otherwise can possibly stop the process.

We struggle to maintain a dead past in the name of peace and refuse the new life that running water brings to
everything. We confuse “stagnant” with “calm” and call it holiness. We miss the power of the paradox that peace is not passivity and that a living death is neither death nor life.

And all the while, we miss the new beaches that great waves bring from which to launch our new and vibrant lives.

The desire for a false peace may be the most powerful inner signal we have of our tendency toward a spiritual death wish. The historian Arnold Toynbee says of it, “The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.”

It is staying alive while we are alive that is the challenge. And it is only the ability to negotiate the waves of life that can possibly save us from choosing brackish water over a few tumbles in the churning—but renewing—whitecaps of time.

Security is a fragile thing. One day we have it; the next day we don’t. The problem is, How is it possible to tell what is really security from insecurity?

The Sufis tell an ancient story that strikes at the heart of the issue of security, splits it open for all to see its fragility and makes us all think again about what it means to be secure.

Once upon a time, the old story reports, there was a bird that sheltered in the withered branches of an old tree that stood in the middle of a vast deserted plain. One day a whirlwind uprooted the tree. The bird was bereft. What would he ever do now? Where could he go? There were no other trees in sight. There were no berry bushes in this place. There were no companions with whom to flock for support. Alone and distraught, he flew and flew and flew hundreds of weary miles in search of sanctuary. Almost
in despair and ready to give up, he suddenly saw it. There, over the last dune, was a forest of young trees. Each of them heavy with fruit. And thus began a whole new life.