Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (4 page)

The question with which the story leaves us but does not answer, however, is as important as the story itself: How long did this latest shelter last? In fact, what exactly is the life span of security? Of any security? And if we can’t define the time span of the word security, why do we seek it with such passion?

The truth is that security is not so much a state of life as it is a state of mind. It is the eternal quest for safety, for knowing that the ground under us is firm and settled, for knowing that our life is still under our control. It’s an important part of the human psyche, this assurance that life is predictable. It is only trust that enables us to roam through the world, one foot nailed to the ground, attached to the string that will lead us back to where we’ve come from. Just in case things go wrong out here we have somewhere to go back to again. Security in this sense is the lifeline that makes us free.

The problem is that what we call security, like any anchor, is also a mooring that ties people down. “Those who have cattle have care,” the Kenyans say. The more we accrue—from money to jewelry to property to houses—the more we have to guard and tend and protect them. Until, pretty soon, we find ourselves spending our lives on taking care of everything our money has bought.

Security, at least in the form of money, is meant to provide us with options in difficult times and, of course, it does. But it does other things, as well, that too often become as
much burden as blessing. Obsession with financial security can blind us to the joy of the present, for instance, or block us from daring a less financially attractive future.

There is a point at which security makes change difficult, if not impossible. It can take the spring out of life and put in its place nothing more than the memory of what it was to contemplate possibilities. How do we simply take off and hike across Europe or do youth camping in Colorado or water purification work in Africa and leave behind the works and accumulations of a lifetime? Instead, we find ourselves beholden to the successes and interests of the past—more caretaker than explorer now, more manager of the past than inventor of the future.

There is a fear factor in undue concern for security, as well. Rather than launch out to test and fulfill the rest of our abilities, we cling to the little we have. We take security at too great a price. We fail to move beyond what is safe, we abandon our dreams in favor of what is sure rather than strive for what is best for us.

Then, too late—if at all—we discover that the need for security begins to preclude all other thoughts. It is what plagues us at night and follows us during the day. We live full of worry that it might well disappear when we aren’t looking. Security has done its worst: We are now prisoners of our own small designs. And the false freedom that was to have come with it is finally exposed for the hollowness of the promise it brings.

Worst of all, sooner or later we all discover the most egregious element of all about security: It is not only bogus, it is out of our hands. It is totally dependent on outside influences
and circumstances over which we have no control, never did have any control, never will have any control. If you’re Rockefeller, the stock market crashes; if you’re on welfare, the government cuts the stipend; if you’re Bernie Madoff, the police come.

And what, in the middle of the night, do you do then to assuage yourself of anxiety, to convince yourself to get up the next morning? There is only one way to deal with security: Don’t worship it; don’t count on it. But at the same time, understand that the universe is friendly. Something else is waiting for us over the next dune. As the ancients imply, for every dead and uprooted tree, there is another forest of young ones waiting to take us in.

Risk, the willingness to accept an unknown future with open hands and happy heart, is the key to the adventures of the soul. Risk stretches us to discover the rest of ourselves–our creativity, our self-sufficiency, our courage. Without risk we live in a small world of small dreams and lost possibilities.

Risk prods us on to become always the more of ourselves. It is the invitation to the casino of life.

Like the bird, we must be prepared at all times to move on, to keep trying, to realize that calamity is as much a part of life as security will ever be. And if security brings confidence as well as worry, calamity, as disruptive as it may be, will also bring us new growth and enlightenment.

So many of the illusions of life hide in full view. But we cling to them, nevertheless. We need them, perhaps, for reasons at first not apparent, even to ourselves.

Power, one of the major illusions of life, is the modern drug of choice. Its effects are everywhere to be seen. A trip to the pyramids in Egypt, for instance, promises a sure sign of it. Or if not there, a journey to Stonehenge in England, perhaps, or to Newgrange in Ireland ought to certify it for sure. All of these are monuments to ages long gone and societies forever disappeared. There are no tomes of history to explicate their glory. There are no steles or stone tablets or runes to cite their contributions to humankind. There are no relics of their triumphs or even of their losses.

There are no other clues to their existence. These powerful ones, certain of their security, came, they saw, they conquered, as the ancients put it—and then they disappeared.

There is nothing left by which to remember them, no great exploits to preserve, no moral achievements to emulate. Only one thing is clear. Their pyramids and markers and monuments have become memorials only to the deaths of the people who raised them in anonymity and left them in obscurity. The certainty of security—of power, of status, of money, of fame—of immutable claim to the good life, has escaped them all. However thick the walls they built around them, in the end they could not guarantee their own invulnerability. This kind of surety escapes all of us, as well.

The very thought of it—for workers, savers, strivers, winners all—haunts us. After all, why else work if not to achieve? We seek security like crabs in want of water. We expect our talents, triumphs, and proficiencies to be recognized, to be rewarded. We want our achievements noted, our status guaranteed. And we want more and more of both. We want everything we can have. We live with an open grasp outstretched. And at night, we fear the emptying of it.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, also clearly plagued by the idea, wrote of it:

This awareness of the transitoriness of life is deep in us, however stable life seems for us now. The question haunts us: Is this all there is?

The fear of loss, of change, of transition is the private nightmare of so many yet. We see houses, even of the wealthy, washed away in rogue storms. We watch bank accounts wither. We see food lines lengthen. We hear of businesses that have closed, of professionals who have been overwhelmed with debt, of last year’s secure who have now become insecure. We fear, even in our security, the insecurity that stalks us all.

So we toss and turn at night. We stay awake trying to plan for the unexpected. But the very fact that a thing is unexpected makes planning a foolish and feeble exercise. Yes, he may die. Yes, the factory may close. Yes, the child may fail. Yes, the property values may decline and the medical bills go up. Yes, my kingdom, too, may disappear. The fear of it all clings to us in the darkness like the smell of damp in the woods.

Then, the next morning, however secure we are, we give even more energy to guaranteeing ourselves for life.

Certainty has its advantages, of course, seductive and sirenlike. It promises us immortal indemnity, yes, and it also brings with it the sweet taste of eternal delight. The problem is that its assertions are sterile, lifeless, frail. They bring no warranty of their warranty.

Certainty sits on the road in front of us and claims to make the angst of future planning unnecessary. After all, once I get what I want, I have it, don’t I? But then why go on tossing and turning in the night unless, of course, I already know, down deep, that the real answer is, Who knows? Who knows when the sickness will come, when the institution will close? When the circumstances will change? Or worse, when I myself will tire of the routine of it? And wish for a wilder ride through life than certainty can ever give.

Certainty promises us a life free of care. And yet, even when we are most secure in our own definitions of eternal peace, of surety, of success, our expectations dull. After all, what else is there to want now? Life becomes routine, an exercise in a string of tomorrows just like our string of yesterdays.

But if we listen with a clearer ear to the voices of the soul when panic sets in, we may hear a different kind of message. We may come to understand that there are burdens that come with certainty as well as the promise of blessings.

It is possible, the heart tells us, that in our search for certainty we may be missing the graces that come with its attendant reality, fortuity.

The search for certainty always puts us in the position of having to foreclose on options that, however unsure or risk-laden, might even be better for us in the long run. Doing what we want to do rather than what we are sure can garner us a sure life in a sure place for a sure amount of time may actually be the more joyful, more fulfilling
route for us. Then, we might be able to go to bed happy, alive with potentiality, rather than weighed down by the elusiveness of certainty.

When we opt for certainty, we make change inconceivable. When change comes unbidden and without our permission, it looks more dangerous than daring, more of an enemy than a liberator. The very intrusion of the unanticipated into our well-planned lives stands to shake life to its very foundations. Rather than simply invite us to move on to even more growthful pastures than the bogs into which we’ve settled, change that is unwanted, unexpected, unwelcomed threatens the very fiber of our lives.

Certainty, for all its guarantees, demands a subservient companion. It comes at the price of both liberty and creativity. It nails our feet to the floor and calls it success.

The wisdom of the night is a hard one to bear, perhaps, but the very matter of our discontent at the thought of change tells us that there are other lessons to learn in life. Mignon McLaughlin writes, “It’s the most unhappy people who most fear change.” We must come to understand that dullness is itself an irritant of the soul and it is the very uncertainty of certainty that prods us to grow.

It is the spirit of invention and possibility to which uncertainty calls us. What uncertainty brings us to is the security that comes with knowing that we finally developed in ourselves the ability to grow, to adjust, to become.

There are ways of saying it on the streets that are less elegant than professionals might phrase it, perhaps, but it’s difficult to say it better than the clichés: “What goes up must come down” is one kind of popular wisdom. Another says it a bit more subtly maybe but just as wisely: “Remember that the people you meet on the way up you’ll meet again on the way down.” The point is clear: Power and status are movable feasts. Nobody holds either of them forever or for sure. Negotiating between the two ends of the social scale is one of the major challenges of life, a mark of mental health and, in the long run, a measure of our happiness.

The social scale is a two-way street. The fact is that people go both up and down the social scale, inexorably, in every arena, always. These are the people who have become “famous” at whatever social level for some reason and then discovered the difficulty that fame brings.

Sometimes they’re celebrities with unusual talent who outlived the talent that brought them to public attention and found themselves off the charts, off the stage, outside the social circle they had come to take for granted.

Sometimes they’re politicians whose personal charisma swept them into public office but then suffered the disappointment of constituents whose expectations they could not meet.

Sometimes they’re just people like you and I who were local company CEOs and had a change of personal fortune. In many cases they were trusted businesspeople who steered a local company into bankruptcy. Often they are anyone who has achieved some kind of public recognition or responsibility and then wakes up one morning to find out that the committee has been disbanded or the office has been eliminated or simply that the people who once asked you for answers to their questions are now calling somebody else.

More commonly than we realize, they’re average middle-aged couples once identified by the local church as “Family of the Year” who then had to bear the headlines in the local paper trumpeting the fact that their child had been convicted for dealing drugs. Whatever the situation, the sun has shifted in another direction, the star over my life has faded, one of my reasons for getting up in the morning has gone.

The truth is that all social positions, no matter how small or how large on anybody’s sociometric scale, are fragile. They depend in some instances on term lengths alone: After so many years in an office no matter how much a
person likes a position, fits the position, it ends. The psychological impact of being removed from something simply because the time is up, whether the person’s interest or capacity for the work is up or not, is necessarily unsettling.