WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?
Chapter Seven
What Is the Worst Thing That Never Happened to You?
At a minimum, being preoccupied with Minus is generally enough, to use a sports phrase, to "take you out of your game," to consume energy you might otherwise have applied to bringing forward the realities you do want. A wonderful observation about the effects of this tendency over a person's lifetime has been attributed to Mark Twain:
"I am an old man and have had many terrible problems, and most of them never happened."
It doesn't take a whole lifetime, though, to pile up quite a substantial list of terribly preoccupying things which never happen to us! During the span of mere hours, my imagination was once turned loose to conjure a list of negative possibilities beyond anything I had previously contemplated. During Peace Corps training, we were required to climb a mountain. Twelve of us made this particular climb, along with two guides. One of the guides was reputed to be a bit of a maniac, which meant, from my point of view, that he did not have the proper respect for caution in life. Not long before our climb, he had gotten out of the hospital, having been severely injured when he drove his small sports car off the edge of a cliff. It was obvious to me that he should not have been making the climb with us.
Only slightly more obvious was the fact that I should not be making such a climb. Especially given my history. There had been that excruciatingly embarrassing moment in high school, after I had showed up to help paint the "E" on the mountain before the big game. I had taken a few steps up the slope when I began to slip around a bit. This was a surprise to me, as I had always been quite sure-footed on the flat terrain of the desert in which I had been raised. To my recollection, this was my first experience of the meaning of the word "phobia." It literally brought me to my knees, where I stayed until I had somehow backed my way off the slope. I cannot remember the specific lies I told; I suspect I said something about having been taken suddenly ill, so that I would be able to go home immediately. As time passed, it became apparent that this phobia applied to, or at least eventually extended to, anything involving heights. Ladders and roofs were soon totally out of the question. Before the phobia peaked and passed into history, I would have to be sedated before traveling on an airplane.
Peace Corps training had been carefully designed to redirect our energies. Shockingly, from my previously-sheltered viewpoint, nobody was even slightly interested in my fears, or even my thoughts about my fears. There was a mountain to climb. I should add that, unlike my high school encounter, this was not a slope. This was a mountain, the tallest in the country where we were being trained. To say that I was gripped with fear during the first half of the ascent would be substantial understatement. I kept looking down and, in the process, imagined a series of horrifying possibilities. Suffice it to say they were numerous, and not a single one ended well. About half way up, we reached a ledge where we could sit and rest. The fact that I was the last to arrive at the ledge was embarrassing, particularly since there were several people in the group who I had earlier deemed to be relatively wimpy or frail. That, however, was the least of my problems.
As I sat on the ledge, shaking and attempting to conceal tears, something happened which brought a whole new set of possibilities to my life. It began with a thought. The thought seemed to come from somewhere outside myself; at a minimum, it was unexpected, not a thought I had ever had before. The thought was: "If you are going to climb a mountain, you might as well be the first one to reach the top." I suppose that the least which might be said about the thought was that it came from further to the Pure Plus side of the spectrum than I had previously encountered, or perhaps been willing to encounter. It wasn't that my fear was somehow whisked away, departing as one of the possibilities available to me in life. Yet, somehow, the previously existing fear was replaced in my consciousness by the reality visible from the thought "first to the top." I made it, too. Toward the very top of the mountain, I had to pull myself up by some vines or roots (I never did figure out which) growing out of the mountain. At one point, after I had dug my fingers in behind two slightly moist outcroppings which I mistook for solid, I began to slip, leaving ten fingered claw marks on the steep side of the mountain. I managed to swing over and catch hold of a rock and a root or vine, positioning myself to get over the last rise and onto the peak.
I stood up, then walked a few steps and sat down on a large rock in the midst of the most breathtakingly beautiful scene I had ever witnessed. I held up my hand and watched a cloud break around it. There were tiny flowers growing all around me. I was not knowledgeable about such things, but they resembled small orchids. And one could see much of the water surrounding the island where our training was taking place. After fifteen or twenty minutes, I reached my hand down and helped the first of the guides up over the last ridge. Soon, the others joined us. I think everyone must have had the same awed response to the peak, as no one spoke so much as a word for quite a while. Amazingly, fear had simply absented itself from the moment of the thought on the ledge until, after the better part of an hour on the peak, I had a mildly distressing thought: we would have to get down the mountain. But in contrast to the experience of overdrive empowerment of each of the earlier fear-based thoughts into a sort of mind-filling reality, "descent" seemed a trifling matter. Of the two possibilities, it had been my descent into my own Minus-based thought process which had proved traumatic. Earlier, I had "elevated" a series of negative thoughts to the point that I "knew" things would work out badly. That was "real" for me. I was totally focused on the things I did not want, and was giving no thought whatever to what I did want. Had I kept that up, "self-fulfilling prophecy" might have come into play, and I might have actually created injury to myself, or worse.
I suggest that when we "know" something is negative, we may be grossly overestimating ourselves and, in particular, our ability to reach such conclusions with the vehicle "available evidence." We must seriously consider whether this arrogance truly serves us or, for that matter, serves any genuinely useful purpose! At a minimum, when we indulge in the "create it as negative" process, there is a tendency to be self-defeating in terms of the realities we hope to bring forward. In effect, we build our houses on sand instead of on rock, vastly underestimating, and perhaps undermining, what might actually be available. That is precisely what I was doing on that mountain, until I was sitting on the ledge. Having constructed my reality on that less-than-firm foundation, it is no accident that I felt so "shaky" during the earlier parts of the climb!
In this sense, it probably is true that good things often happen in spite of ourselves or, to use a commonly understood religious phrase, due to "God's grace"! I might have arrived at the top of the mountain and enjoyed it despite myself, although I suspect I would have been such a wreck by the time I had finished ascending my negative reality that enjoyment of even that "peak experience" would have eluded me. It is probably mandatory, if we would generate lives of profound winning, for us to begin to question the notion that what is really available in life is inherently limited by such things as "what we have encountered so far," or even by "the most we think is available," particularly given our history of "seeing" (creating) life through a negative filter.
I have since learned that one need not confront a mountain to engage those parts of ourselves which energize the unwanted. For my friend Richard, a set of steps proved sufficient on one particularly cold winter night. Given a few physical considerations, the steps certainly matched, perhaps exceeded, my "mountain," as almost anything can do if we allow it.
Richard had broken his neck while he was a Peace Corps Volunteer. He had been assured, after being transferred to a large center specializing in treatment of quadriplegia, that he would never move again from the neck down. Later, when Richard and his doctor walked together out of the hospital, the doctor showed Richard an entry on his chart: "patient continues to insist he will walk; that is clearly impossible but, rather than break his spirit, five or ten minutes each day will be devoted to 'rehabilitation.'" To this day, Richard walks in a manner which might be called "halting," yet he has no major trouble in getting around. At least that has been true for the most part. Very late one wintry night in Colorado, though, he decided to take a short cut across his university campus. He had climbed about half the way up a steep bank of steps which were ice-covered. Suddenly, it occurred to him that, if he were to fall, he would probably die. First, it would be unlikely that he would be able to get up without assistance. Also, that part of the campus was quite deserted, so it was improbable that he would be found in time. His injury had damaged his body's ability to heat and cool normally, and he would not be able to survive on ice and snow for any great length of time.
When he realized "the implications of his predicament," he simply froze with fear. For the better part of a half-hour, he found himself rooted to the spot while his mind considered the awful situation in which he found himself, including all the variations on the theme "harm." Richard is quite brilliant, after all. Knowing him well, I suspect he left few stones unturned in terms of negative possibilities. Finally, it occurred him: "the fear wasn't adding anything useful to the situation!" At that point, he simply finished climbing the steps!
How many times, I wonder, does fear stop us in our pursuits? The advice "keep your eye on the prize," the thing you most deeply want, has universal application in the presence of life's circumstances. An untoward focus on the unwanted, whether in the guise of fear or any of its other disguises, will not always bring forward the unwanted reality. Yet it always threatens to do so, making it imperative that we train ourselves to at least think about what we are doing! When we say we "see" how a situation or circumstance is, we are actually creating our seeing. Invariably, there are a multitude of ways to create in the presence of life's content. It is hazardous, to say the least, to create mostly from the Minus side of the spectrum!