I’ve been waiting…waiting for the perfect inspiration, the perfect response to the tumultuous insanity and brutal cruelty in our nation and around the world. I’ve checked out others’ amazing posts, reels, and podcasts while listening within for what I might offer as my creative contribution…something beyond my incessant one-word cry, “NO!”
Instead of sky-splitting inspiration, what emerged was a memory from third grade. Once a year, our parents would come to see what we little urchins did in elementary school all day. In preparation, we would muster our burgeoning talents to create something impressive for the evening. My classmates offered MOMA-worthy collages and watercolors. Having barely mastered stick figures, I felt paralyzed, worthless, good for nothing. What could I possibly offer?
I was pretty good at math. So, I decided to fill half a chalkboard with a math problem that was above third-grade mastery. Like an endurance athlete, I wrestled the numbers into submission, refusing to stop until the problem was solved.
The little boy in me began to draw a conclusion: I had to earn belonging. To be seen, heard, praised, validated…and yes, to be loved…would require immense effort, hyper-responsibility and herculean endurance. He forged an identity as a reliable doer, responsible for finding perfect answers. While this was useful for standardized tests, calculus homework, and editing dog grooming curriculum for the seventh time (thanks for the memories PETCO!), it’s exhausting, and it suffocates creative potential.
In a recent session with my spiritual director, we revisited this memory. In my imagination, my younger self was asked: if he could let go of trying to earn belonging, if he trusted his true identity as a Love-Beyond-Earning, what might be possible? His instantaneous reply: “I would erase the half-finished math problem and write ‘Free Hugs’ on the chalkboard and then give a hug to anyone who wanted one!”
What about you? If you could erase and rewrite a memory, belief, decision about yourself, or way of being in the world, what possibilities might emerge for you? What provisional responses might you experiment with, holding chalk in one hand and an eraser in the other, liberated from the burdens of perfection and earning belonging?
Taking this metaphor one step further, evokes another question: Who am I, really? Ultimately, I am neither the math problem nor free hugs. I am the blank chalkboard. I am the awareness on which complicated problems and creative responses appear and disappear. I am the possibility chalkboard that holds every experience and shifting identity without being permanently defined by any chalky emanation.
Such vast openness can be scary and also liberating. I am no longer at the mercy of an easily-triggered coping mechanism nor a rigid decision made in third grade. If a problem shows up, I’ll deal with it, but I don’t have to create one in order to feel better about a self-constructed identity who needs constant validation to believe he deserves love and belonging. And when that constricted, grasping part emerges, my only response is compassion. That little boy made the best decision he could at the time.
So, what does all this have to do with the current political, global and ecological disaster? To continue the metaphor, there’s vomit all over the chalkboard. It’s horrific. Remember the pie-eating contest in the movie Stand by Me that became a “barf-a-rama”? It’s like that. There’s a lot to clean up with more mess to come. This is the current reality.
Yet it is not Ultimate Reality. It is not the chalkboard itself. It is not who and what we most essentially are, which is timeless and unbound. Which means we have choices other than fear, unrelenting rage with nowhere to direct it, habitual coping mechanisms, numbing, avoidance, despair, or auto-pilot decisions from third grade. We are potential. We are possibility.
Furthermore, we aren’t in the classroom alone. Isolated, this mess is too much to bear. Where and with whom is your belonging, a belonging that can neither be earned nor taken away? Life fights back in interwoven community. When the moral arc of the universe bends toward catastrophe, there are always pockets of collective light and resilience, communities of belonging responding with creative potential because love cannot do otherwise. As Mary Oliver wrote in her poem “Don’t Hesitate”:
Still, life has some possibility left.
Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches or power in the world.
It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins.
Where do you notice some possibility left, no matter how slight? Where is love beginning again?
What is your version of “free hugs”, your authentic, alive response to this moment? Not the perfect or permanent response, nor the doing of an isolated individual responsible for fixing this mess of a world, nor the grasping of a needy little one trying to earn love, but your next, tentative, small step, and who is in step with you?
Whether the chalkboard says “free hugs”, is full of scribbles, or is covered in vomit, we can take a step back, know and ground in who we really are, and become the “instant when love begins”, over and over again, together. As bad as it is, life still has some possibility left, and we are it.