The path & a lamp

Relating to the future

The journey is an old trouper of a metaphor for life, meant to capture that feeling of putting one foot in front of the other, then dealing with and ideally learning from what one encounters on the path. The metaphor is readily worked: incomplete navigational aids, harsh terrain, fellow travelers met going in either direction, delights or horrors around a bend – the platform is flexible, a desirable trait in a metaphor. The reference is to an interior path more than a physical one, although exploratory moves in external space (aka, travel) tend to awaken the interior senses, as well.

Navigating this same interior landscape is the heart of the martial arts, where students are counseled: “We do martial arts on the inside.” Our challenging terrain, our sense of direction and destination, our true north are within, all available to us in the practice of the martial art.

I’ve been studying Chen Taijiquan (aka, tai chi) for 2+ years and recently encountered two internal characters who wind up frequently polarized in my inner landscape: Elizabeth and Isabelle. I’ve noticed recently how they differ in their attitude toward the future.

Elizabeth is someone you want to have on your committee because she will make sure that a conference room is reserved and hot coffee gets there on time for meetings. She will take notes when no one else wants to and make sure that a task list with assignments gets done before everyone leaves. She is medium build, medium brown hair, sings second soprano: pretty much everything about her is “medium.” She owns a lot of maps and has a First Aid kit in her car. She is cautious and sensible; she is prepared and reserved. Her idea of getting “dressed up” is braiding her hair. She never inhaled. Her main role in my life is to protect me.

But if it were up to her, Elizabeth would have me stay home and watch “Law and Order” reruns all day, preferably episodes we’d already seen so there would be no suspense, such is her anxiety about life. The cha-chung of the sound track stimulates sufficient cortisol for excitement, as far as she’s concerned.

Her partner/opponent is Isabelle. Conversations with Isabelle are very animated: she is curious and playful, quick-witted and amusing. She can lose focus easily; it would take only minutes to convince her that the most fascinating thing in the world, the key to the meaning of life, is to study medieval Polish – she’d be checking on her cell phone for a Rosetta Stone within minutes. She loves TED talks and MeetUps; she thrives on books and conferences.

And I know I need them both in an integrated whole, not in an alternating hegemony. I found myself thinking about how the two of them, my interior characters, relate to the future when I recently read Einstein’s thought: “I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.”

Elizabeth’s anxiety winds up being something I have to protect myself from, which is ironic, given that she sees herself as my protector. Her attitude toward the future is a one syllable word: dread. It is not a reasoned dread, a sense that comes from some particular danger; it is free-floating, amorphous dread. The image I’ve used in counseling is of the plate dispenser at a buffet, those metal carts that contain stacks of plates spring-loaded from below: when a plate is removed, another one pops into place. This is how Elizabeth experiences life: once Dreaded Thing A is handled, Dreaded Thing B is promptly at hand.

Isabelle, on the other hand, is just not that worried about anything, which of course drives Elizabeth nuts. Isabelle would meet a serial killer and say, “Wow, I’ve never met a serial killer before – long hours, huh?” She knows that fear exists but it’s as if it lives in a different neighborhood and she doesn’t go there that often.

In these ruminations, a scripture passage came to mind. The Psalmist wrote “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Psalm 119: 105). When there’s a lamp at your feet, you don’t see very far ahead. Elizabeth wants to see a large neon sign on the horizon indicating the location of comfortable wealth, a passionate love and a great car but that is not what a lamp at the level of your feet can offer. Hence, she is constantly upset.

Isabelle, on the other hand, is delighted that, first of all, with a lamp at the level of your feet, you can see that there is a path, which is enormous consolation. You are not just a random bag of atoms banging around with other random bags of atoms. And you can see the next one or two steps, which at any point in time is all you need. In fact, the step to be taken right now and its companion keep you in the present moment, by definition. And her favorite part is that more steps are revealed as you take them: it is in the step taking that the path is then revealed.

So, Isabelle is the one who maintains the meditation practice for the team: she has no trouble staying in the moment. The present – this next step and its partner the one after that – are where she finds excitement, even pleasure. She thrives in the interior landscape, where I find my truest sense of myself. That path is home.