A Chance To Live to the Point of Tears
I’m getting my first dose of vaccination later today. My wife’s first is next week and many others of my age cohort (over sixty five) are somewhere in the process. Some have had one, some have appointments, some are still working on getting in the queue and some haven’t decided whether they’re going to play or not. My ninety-three year old mom has had both shots.
I’ve been hearing from friends and relatives about their experiences and it reminds me of being in high school and maybe talking about final exams (“How did you answer number five?”). It could be a little like milling around outside after a fire alarm has forced everyone to evacuate their work premises. We all have questions, we’re checking in, wondering if there’s a real fire somewhere.
It also reminds me of when I used to lead ropes courses in Northern California, especially the zip line. I’d be up on the platform where participants jumped off. My job was to ensure safety, proper clipping into carabiner, cable and climbing harness and then ask some helpful questions as students got through whatever fears they had.
I would assure them that the cable would support a VW and, although it felt really scary and really high off the ground, it was actually very safe. There was a high sense of perceived risk, when the actual risk was very low.
That perceived risk vs actual risk is where we find ourselves, as a nation, indeed, as a planet, working out how to end this pandemic. We’re all at the base of a Douglas Fir that seems to reach up to the clouds, weighing it out, deciding whether or not to climb up to the zip line. Will I have a reaction? Will there be side effects? Everyone is different, after all.
In David Whyte’s 2014 volume Consolations, he writes about what courage means.
He suggests we look in a more interior direction, toward its original template, the old Norman French, Coeur, or heart.
“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made
The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart of the fundamental level. It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple every day necessities of being alive.”
This vaccination process is a rare opportunity to be in this together and, unlike with mask wearing, do something with some perceived risk. A chance to live to the point of tears.
