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Recently I listened to Rob Bell on this podcast, talking about a concussion he got while surfing. I had wondered why he’d been so quiet lately. Turns out, his accident is causing a bunch of things to shift for him, including any desire he has to be linear, make one point follow another, tell other people what to do. He’s just writing stories now. He says the accident was a wake-up call.
Of course, this prompts me to wonder, “What’s my surfing accident?”
I don’t want anything as dramatic as a concussion, but I DO want to be awake to my life. To be on my own, messy path instead of signing up for what all the corporate influencers are pushing on us—formulas for wealth and well-being, promises of safety and happiness, an extremely individualistic (and expensive!) route to self-actualization.
This time of year, the pressure starts to build with my own expectations of myself and others’ expectations of me. Especially as a woman, I’m beginning to realize that I have rarely NOT MET others’ expectations of me. I have rarely strayed from the linear path. I do the thing. I host the thing. I remember the birthdays; I make the special dessert. I firm up plans, get to the point, clean the house before guests come.
But what if I fell off my surfboard?
What would my wake-up call tell me?
I might hear:
- Take your time
- Don’t look for identity in work
- Celebrate survival
- Go outside whenever possible
- Daydream
- Ask for what you want
- Sing and dance
- Say “no” without reason
- Share stories instead of opinions
- Take a nap
- Don’t fall into the traps of comfort and accumulation
- Stop pretending like you know where you are going
And I don’t know where I’m going. All I know is that I am alive today, and I might be alive tomorrow, maybe with you. In my Music that Makes Community singing group this morning (highly recommend!), we talked about the difference between hope and optimism, riffing off a piece from Joan Halifax. Joan says,
The pessimist would say, “It’s going to be a terrible winter; we’re all going to die.”
The optimist would say, “Oh, it’ll be all right; I don’t think it’ll be that bad.”
The hopeful person would say, “Maybe someone will still be alive in February, so I’m going to put some potatoes in the root cellar just in case.”
If I fell off my surfboard, I hope I would wake up to the total miracle of life, the fact that I am here, that I can put some potatoes away in my root cellar for you because you might survive, too. Our wake-up call isn’t about extravagant adventures, but about occasionally seeing past all the conventions, structures, and expectations that keep us bound up and in our hyper-individualistic bubbles. We are here to tell and listen to stories, to be part of one another’s stories.
I’ve finally come ashore, a little bruised and loopy, but I’m alive. I hope you are, too.
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