Reality Check
I’m coming down with a bad case of acute authenticity. Or at least the desire for it and the sense of that desire breaking down my defenses, making me feel what I feel and sometimes saying it out loud. This can be a problem. Symptoms arise in my personal life, in my spiritual life, in my writing. Just when I think I have it under control, there’s an outbreak and I go and do something that will not readily respond to treatment. I’ve stuck my neck out and now it hurts.
This season, around the Jewish New Year, is not an occasion for all-nighters and noisemakers. Nor is it traditionally a time for resolutions. But this year, I’ve been visited by a set of urgings all centering around this idea of authenticity and all clamoring for my attention as I barrel into the Hebrew calendar year 5782 along with a busload of bad news. These are not resolutions of the eating-less-cake variety. They are not calling for austerity, retreat from life. On the contrary, they are asking me to be braver, more fully myself. It’s almost as if my organism is saying hey, if we’re going to suffer fire, flood, pestilence, and humbug, let’s for God’s sake do it without dissembling, without artifice. Let’s look the beast in the eye.
Photo by Valeria Volosciuc on Unsplash
Beginning inside my own belly, with its swarm of butterflies flitting here and there over a sea of self-doubt, I decide if I can’t know what I’m doing, I can at least know what I’m feeling. I realize that this is the oldest hat in the hall closet, but it’s new to me! I am discovering, late in the day to be sure, that I can have a feeling that I don’t like, that does not make me look good or feel good and just welcome it to the guest house of my life as Rumi suggests in his famous poem of that name. A persistent background murmur of inadequacy, the fear that I’ve said something foolish or hurtful, the conviction that I haven’t been heard or understood can all shuffle in, stretch out, make a big mess and then move on. It takes courage to give these slugs a seat at the table.
Once they’re all assembled, all my weaknesses and imperfections, along with my gifts, I can breathe a little more easily. I can say that I have a least a tenuous grip on reality, on who I am. But how can that be the alpha and omega? What about everybody else, my contemporaries enduring various forms of ill-health, the world in all its suffering. And what about the bear that sometimes decides to cross in front of my car on route 7 and the purple asters parading up and down my driveway? There is no me outside my relationship to them, my relationship to you. I believe it was Buber who said “we begin with the self, but we don’t end with the self.”
Yet here we are stuck in American exceptionalism. Not only that old playground taunt “my country is better than your country,” but the notion that each of us, as Americans, is entitled to do whatever she pleases, without regard for anyone else’s wellbeing. It is our constitutional and, dare I say, God-given right to turn our backs on the children, on the vulnerable, on the great masses of people in the developing world who don’t have access to vaccines. Whatever happened to shared sacrifice?
When my father was dying in New York Hospital, I sat at his bedside, watching and listening for his last breath and the next one long seconds later. My mother and sister stood with their backs to us looking out the window at the East River. They refused to witness and this refusal has for me become the paradigm of the life I don’t want. I don’t want to pretend that life isn’t hard and I don’t want to pretend that I can fix it alone or that as long as I’m not sick everything’s just fine and that is just what vaccine refusal amounts to. It’s turning one’s back. It’s playing dead. We all need to pirouette and face each other, as well as the consequences of not facing each other. We need to look the beast in the eye and make the world a safer place.
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Yep, that's it all right!
Yes, it's messy and painful inside and out. We're all bozos on the bus but many don't realize it. That's part of what's painful and our own failures of awareness and caring. Thanks for the deep honesty.