How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life. Barbara Angelis De

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СКАЧАТЬ unsatisfying, and that everyone else is deliriously happy, the truth is something quite different: All of us are lifetime warriors in a prolonged battle—with change, with reluctant endings and scary beginnings, with assessments and reassessments, with more moments of disappointment than we care to count.

      Recently I was going through some old notebooks I’d kept from college, and I discovered a page I’d written in my early twenties listing my personal goals and dreams. As I read the items on my life wish list, I was astonished by two things. The first was that I had indeed accomplished many of the goals I’d set for myself over thirty years ago: to become a published author, to move to California, to teach people about relationships and personal growth, to create a community of conscious people, to travel to exotic places around the world, to study with wise spiritual teachers, to fall in love and have a beautiful wedding, to own a home, to perform onstage, just to name a few.

      The second realization I had as I read the items I’d included was more sobering. I became aware of how many unexpected things had happened to me that certainly were not on my original wish list. I had not written: Get divorced … more than once; be cheated by dishonest business partners; lose lots of money in the stock market; create alliances with companies that go bankrupt; Battle unfair lawsuit; brave slanderous attacks by jealous colleague; lose dear friends to cancer. I certainly didn’t remember setting these events as goals, yet they had occurred just the same.

      Then it dawned on me—like so many of us, like the clever man in the fable, I had always believed my challenges would lie in overcoming the obstacles to my goals. But I was wrong. My deepest turmoil has had nothing to do with the things I didn’t get, but rather with the things I did not expect, and got anyway.

       It is not the things we want and don’t get that are the source of our greatest tests and trials— it is the things we do get that we did not want and never expected.

      “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” —J. R. R. Tolkien

      Here is how it happens—you are going along with your life, minding your own business, when suddenly “it” hits you, and you are stopped dead in your tracks. What is “it”? “It” may be an event that forces you to pay attention to the realities of your life that you’ve been avoiding: the passionless marriage you pretend is better than ever until one day your husband walks out; the distant daughter you tell everyone is really doing fine until you discover the stash of heavy drugs in her drawer; the sixty-hour-a-week job you claim to love in spite of how exhausted you always are, until you collapse with a heart attack one day.

      Sometimes “it” is loss—loss of love, loss of money, loss of trust, loss of security, loss of job, loss of health, loss of opportunity, loss of hope. Sometimes “it” sneaks up on you quietly, like a thick fog slowly rolling in over your life, so that nothing seems clear to you anymore and you feel lost. And sometimes “it” isn’t sneaky at all, but bold. You know “it” is coming—you can feel it breathing down your neck. Still, you tell yourself it will miss you, like those asteroids that hurtle toward the earth but never quite get a direct hit. But you are wrong. “It” does not miss.

      “It” is whatever you didn’t want to happen, whatever you didn’t want to feel, whatever you didn’t want to face, whatever you didn’t want ever to have to experience. “It” is always unexpected, even when you’ve watched “it” approach every step of the way, because there is simply no way you can imagine that you will feel so scared or confused or miserable or disheartened or stuck or out of control—until you do.

      I’ve concluded something else about the unexpected—it always seems to show up at the worst moment. Like a guest with horrific timing who, year after year, invariably chooses the most hectic weekend of your life to come stay with you, the unexpected has a knack for choosing just the wrong instant to arrive. Doesn’t “it” always seem to happen when you are already the most stressed, overextended and under pressure, when you have just announced that you cannot take one more thing going wrong? “I can’t deal with this right now!” you lament. “This is not a good time.” But let’s be honest—is there ever a “good” time for the arrival of unwelcome events, insights, or challenges? Of course there isn’t.

      The unexpected is always inconvenient.

      The great statesman Henry Kissinger summed it up succinctly: “Next week there can’t be any crisis. My schedule is already full.”

      The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to a place where we think we can’t handle what is happening It’s too much. It’s gone too far … There’s no way we can manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good. No matter how hard we try, it just won’t work. Basically, life has just nailed us. —Pema Chodron

      When I was in elementary school, I had a teacher whom I will call Mrs. Rhodes. She was one of those educators whose choice of vocation was a mystery, for it was obvious, even to me at the tender age of eight, that she possessed an intense dislike of children that she made no attempt to hide from us. Determined to retaliate, the little boys used to amuse themselves by tossing wads of spit-covered chewing gum at her head when she wasn’t looking, hoping to implant their peppermint-scented weapons in her tight mass of metallic-gray pin curls.

      Mrs. Rhodes was a stickler for accuracy in all things, and one of her favorite ways to torture us was to excoriate us for our mistakes in front of the entire class. I will never forget the time I became the “victim of the day.” We were in the middle of a writing exercise, and I raised my hand to make a request.

      “Yes, Barbara?” Mrs. Rhodes said scowling at me.

      “May I please be excused to go to the bathroom?” I said in as soft a voice as possible.

      “Don’t mumble—I hate mumblers—what did you say?”

      “I said, may I please be excused.”

      “Why?” Mrs. Rhodes barked.

      “I can’t believe she is going to make me say it,” I thought to myself. I took a deep breath. “Because I want to go to the bathroom.”

      Everyone in the class began to giggle. “SILENCE!” Mrs. Rhodes shouted, and then she turned back to me. “Barbara De Angelis,” she said, “So you want to go to the bathroom. Well, we all want lots of things, don’t we, class? But we don’t get them! No ma’am.”

      “Please, Mrs. Rhodes,” I pleaded, “I just want to go to the bathroom.”

      Mrs. Rhodes walked up to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and in large letters wrote the word W-A-N-T. “Do you see this word, class?” she squawked. “To use it is to express a personal preference, as in ‘I want to play on the swings’, or ‘I want to eat a candy bar.’ It does NOT mean the same thing as this word—” and she spelled out N-E-E-D. “This word does not express a personal preference, it expresses what one considers a necessity, a requirement, an emergency, as in, ‘Mrs. Rhodes, I need to go to the bathroom.’”

      She turned back toward me. I had sunk down as low as I could in my metal chair, for even my little eight-year-old brain knew what was coming next. My classmates were giddy with anticipation, drunk with the joy of watching someone other than themselves be mortified.

      “So, СКАЧАТЬ