Eighteen years ago this month, our Jeep pulled a household of goods over the Appalachians to settle us in the Mississippi Watershed of Southern Wisconsin. As I wrote in the Foreword to my travelogue, Dream Weaver, I was not happy about the move. I was uprooted and left mostly by myself with my son, as my wife continued her sales work on the road. Being a housedad had never been in my plans, and that first winter in Wisconsin, left to the cold winds blowing over expanses of tilled-under cornfields, was dreary to the extreme. Still, what happened towards the end of the next summer after our move was unprecedented in my life. Something bad clicked and my internal dialogue turned brutally towards myself. It was relentless and ruthless, making me feel the helpless victim. Worse, I suffered panic attacks so bad that I thought I was going insane. As I played games with our preschooler, I worried that I might lose it, running out into the cornfields in my underwear screaming something like “Betelgeuse! The aliens are coming!”
I didn’t, and I still don’t understand all of it, but I did find out the source of my anxiety: sleep apnea. After weeks or months of waking up in the middle of the night in a panic because I was not breathing, I finally figured it out. My inner mind, the pre-logical element that takes over in dreams, believed I was being methodically suffocated and would not let that fear leave me even during the day. After a few months I was able to train myself to sleep on my side, and the problem stopped. Some of the other symptoms lingered for a few years more, but the worst was over.
Still, the fear of suffocating can loom large. When I crawled into an MRI for an expensive and useless test of a sinus infection – health insurance can be a curse – I had to be pulled from it the first time. I insisted on re-entering without drugs because, dammit, I was not going to be terrified by something so rationally benign. Forty Five minutes later I emerged like a soul pardoned from Hell. The nurses told me it had taken so long because I had moved too much. They hated me for being such a non-patient patient, and I didn’t care much for them either. That animosity soon passed for me (probably not for the nurses, but I don’t go to the hospital often), but I did realize that my bout with panic attacks had taken its toll. I was now afraid of extremely tight spaces. Not airplanes or closets or elevators, but coffin-like confinement, such as the MRI. My worst nightmare now would be to be trapped head first in a deep and dark cave with no room to move. No, not worst: add water to it. Yes, that would be the worst.
So it was that horror filled me when I read of the boys’ soccer team trapped in a water-filled cave in Thailand more than two miles from the entrance. There were twelve boys in their early to mid- teens with their soccer coach – the same number as Jesus and his disciples, although it was a diver rather than a coach who became the martyr – who were not even discovered for the first ten days of their entrapment after the monsoon rains had started. After that, it had then taken two weeks more for the divers, a mix of international SEALS and avid underwater cave enthusiasts, to take them all out one by one. One part of the cave that was underwater was so tight that the air tanks had to be removed from the back and pushed forward, all while keeping the breathing mask snuggly on the mouth and nose. Holy crap. Worst nightmare. All the boys made it, as well as all but one of the divers.
How were they able to do it? First, the boys and the coach, many of whom could not even swim (not that that would have mattered much in a tight, ink-black water filled tunnel): were they drugged? Not too much because they would need to be alert, but just enough to keep from panicking? More so, the divers: all, I’m sure, had been volunteers. That means, and I have to repeat this to myself, they didn’t have to do it. Are you kidding me? Yes, there were young lives to save, but even if they had been my own children and I would very much have wanted to do it, I do not believe I could have. How was this rescue, then, even possible? Are these guys supermen?
Maybe so, but I suspect not, and that brings up this inquiry: why are some people able to overcome certain fears – or perhaps not even have those fears – while the rest of us tremble before such things in terror? Those dark, tight tunnels are my greatest fear, but I am no hero on the rock face of a cliff, either. I have climbed such things in my youth, with a friend or two to egg me on, and I was able to complete them all, but in each, there was that moment in the middle when I wanted to call the Coast Guard. Down is worse than up. Panic rises, and rises more when you realize that panic will kill you. I was barely able to conquer this fear of heights temporarily, but I would not do something like that again voluntarily. And I simply could not do that cave thing. No. But others can, and do, and even do it for weekend holiday sport.
So the question remains. I recently finished an autobiography written by a Seal, No Hero, who tells of his training and later experiences in combat. He admitted to his intense fear of heights and even, almost unbelievably, his dislike of swimming. But he learned to tough it out. He learned to tough it out because of his driving need to be a SEAL, to be the best in a high-adrenaline profession. He would pull more than a dozen tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He loved the tension. He killed people who wanted to kill him, and he felt bad when he realized that he was burnt-out and had to retire. He would miss the action.
Some do not seem to be afraid at all of tight spaces or heights, but I think for most, it is the adrenaline rush. The TV people did a profile on Shawn White, the red-headed ski boarder, just as he was becoming a big thing at the winter Olympics. They had shots of him and his mother and others who knew him saying pretty much the same thing: Shawn was bored by normal stuff. He needed the excitement of high-flight and the risk of severe pain and even death to feel alive. He had already been through a lot of severe pain. It did not stop him. He was/is no god-man, but he is different.
What of that guy who climbed El Capitan in about two hours without ropes, something thought to be impossible? Thousands of feet above the ground on a sheer face with nothing but toes and fingers and he didn’t even look scared. I do not believe he was scared. He, too, was no god, but he was not like the rest of us either. In his case, he seemed to have little to no fear of heights at all. How did that come to be?
My fear of tight spaces was probably already in place and the sleep apnea only brought it out. But did that fear start, as Freud would have it, at some point in early childhood? Or are we born with such things? If so, what of those who are not – that is, what of those who can do what most of us can barely think about? For those who take the scientific approach, to say that such complex behaviors and affinities come from genes is almost like saying nothing at all. I do not believe that any geneticist could point out all the loci to such behavior, and I do not believe they ever will be able too. But if not randomly - selected genes, then what can we say of the origin of those things that make others so different?
Gifts. In many spiritual/religious homilies, we are told of our ‘gifts’, that which has been given us by some spiritual source that is overall rare. We have looked at some of the extremes, and there are many others with less physical impact. Mozart was not great only because he had early music lessons in childhood; Newton did not invent calculus only because he had been trained in mathematics. They had gifts. And if them, so us, or so the old spiritual traditions tell us. It is, as the non-affiliated grass-roots saint Peace Pilgrim has said, as if we were all part of the same body, each of us a cell contributing - if we do not go off track - to the overall health of the body. We each have our rolls, some of which are standard, and at least one which makes us stand out. This idea was not made up whole cloth; that we are all part of one body, for better and for worse, was stated again and again in the Old Testament and in the Gospels. For instance, we all have original sin; and we all can be of “the body of Christ.”
Not everyone can cave- dive or create a masterpiece or do anything of a spectacular nature. But we all have something, a special flavor at the very least, that is intended to affect the body Human in a positive way. Dang if I know mine. But we are told that if we act as if we are all one in the end – that is, if we treat others as ourselves - that our specialty, our gift or gifts, will shine – perhaps whether we know it or not. To have, as the apostles did, tongues of flame coming out of their heads as they gained such gifts as universal language and healing sure would help, but I think it is true regardless.
If this seems too Pollyann-ish, don’t worry - trouble and suffering are sure to relieve you of that saccharin flavor sooner or later. But I do believe it is true, that we all have a gift or gifts, and that we will find it or them once we understand that we are not alone, but have always been an intended part of it all.
Eighteen years ago this month, our Jeep pulled a household of goods over the Appalachians to settle us in the Mississippi Watershed of Southern Wisconsin. As I wrote in the Foreword to my travelogue, Dream Weaver, I was not happy about the move. I was uprooted and left mostly by myself with my son, as my wife continued her sales work on the road. Being a housedad had never been in my plans, and that first winter in Wisconsin, left to the cold winds blowing over expanses of tilled-under cornfields, was dreary to the extreme. Still, what happened towards the end of the next summer after our move was unprecedented in my life. Something bad clicked and my internal dialogue turned brutally towards myself. It was relentless and ruthless, making me feel the helpless victim. Worse, I suffered panic attacks so bad that I thought I was going insane. As I played games with our preschooler, I worried that I might lose it, running out into the cornfields in my underwear screaming something like “Betelgeuse! The aliens are coming!”
I didn’t, and I still don’t understand all of it, but I did find out the source of my anxiety: sleep apnea. After weeks or months of waking up in the middle of the night in a panic because I was not breathing, I finally figured it out. My inner mind, the pre-logical element that takes over in dreams, believed I was being methodically suffocated and would not let that fear leave me even during the day. After a few months I was able to train myself to sleep on my side, and the problem stopped. Some of the other symptoms lingered for a few years more, but the worst was over.
Still, the fear of suffocating can loom large. When I crawled into an MRI for an expensive and useless test of a sinus infection – health insurance can be a curse – I had to be pulled from it the first time. I insisted on re-entering without drugs because, dammit, I was not going to be terrified by something so rationally benign. Forty Five minutes later I emerged like a soul pardoned from Hell. The nurses told me it had taken so long because I had moved too much. They hated me for being such a non-patient patient, and I didn’t care much for them either. That animosity soon passed for me (probably not for the nurses, but I don’t go to the hospital often), but I did realize that my bout with panic attacks had taken its toll. I was now afraid of extremely tight spaces. Not airplanes or closets or elevators, but coffin-like confinement, such as the MRI. My worst nightmare now would be to be trapped head first in a deep and dark cave with no room to move. No, not worst: add water to it. Yes, that would be the worst.
So it was that horror filled me when I read of the boys’ soccer team trapped in a water-filled cave in Thailand more than two miles from the entrance. There were twelve boys in their early to mid- teens with their soccer coach – the same number as Jesus and his disciples, although it was a diver rather than a coach who became the martyr – who were not even discovered for the first ten days of their entrapment after the monsoon rains had started. After that, it had then taken two weeks more for the divers, a mix of international SEALS and avid underwater cave enthusiasts, to take them all out one by one. One part of the cave that was underwater was so tight that the air tanks had to be removed from the back and pushed forward, all while keeping the breathing mask snuggly on the mouth and nose. Holy crap. Worst nightmare. All the boys made it, as well as all but one of the divers.
How were they able to do it? First, the boys and the coach, many of whom could not even swim (not that that would have mattered much in a tight, ink-black water filled tunnel): were they drugged? Not too much because they would need to be alert, but just enough to keep from panicking? More so, the divers: all, I’m sure, had been volunteers. That means, and I have to repeat this to myself, they didn’t have to do it. Are you kidding me? Yes, there were young lives to save, but even if they had been my own children and I would very much have wanted to do it, I do not believe I could have. How was this rescue, then, even possible? Are these guys supermen?
Maybe so, but I suspect not, and that brings up this inquiry: why are some people able to overcome certain fears – or perhaps not even have those fears – while the rest of us tremble before such things in terror? Those dark, tight tunnels are my greatest fear, but I am no hero on the rock face of a cliff, either. I have climbed such things in my youth, with a friend or two to egg me on, and I was able to complete them all, but in each, there was that moment in the middle when I wanted to call the Coast Guard. Down is worse than up. Panic rises, and rises more when you realize that panic will kill you. I was barely able to conquer this fear of heights temporarily, but I would not do something like that again voluntarily. And I simply could not do that cave thing. No. But others can, and do, and even do it for weekend holiday sport.
So the question remains. I recently finished an autobiography written by a Seal, No Hero, who tells of his training and later experiences in combat. He admitted to his intense fear of heights and even, almost unbelievably, his dislike of swimming. But he learned to tough it out. He learned to tough it out because of his driving need to be a SEAL, to be the best in a high-adrenaline profession. He would pull more than a dozen tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He loved the tension. He killed people who wanted to kill him, and he felt bad when he realized that he was burnt-out and had to retire. He would miss the action.
Some do not seem to be afraid at all of tight spaces or heights, but I think for most, it is the adrenaline rush. The TV people did a profile on Shawn White, the red-headed ski boarder, just as he was becoming a big thing at the winter Olympics. They had shots of him and his mother and others who knew him saying pretty much the same thing: Shawn was bored by normal stuff. He needed the excitement of high-flight and the risk of severe pain and even death to feel alive. He had already been through a lot of severe pain. It did not stop him. He was/is no god-man, but he is different.
What of that guy who climbed El Capitan in about two hours without ropes, something thought to be impossible? Thousands of feet above the ground on a sheer face with nothing but toes and fingers and he didn’t even look scared. I do not believe he was scared. He, too, was no god, but he was not like the rest of us either. In his case, he seemed to have little to no fear of heights at all. How did that come to be?
My fear of tight spaces was probably already in place and the sleep apnea only brought it out. But did that fear start, as Freud would have it, at some point in early childhood? Or are we born with such things? If so, what of those who are not – that is, what of those who can do what most of us can barely think about? For those who take the scientific approach, to say that such complex behaviors and affinities come from genes is almost like saying nothing at all. I do not believe that any geneticist could point out all the loci to such behavior, and I do not believe they ever will be able too. But if not randomly - selected genes, then what can we say of the origin of those things that make others so different?
Gifts. In many spiritual/religious homilies, we are told of our ‘gifts’, that which has been given us by some spiritual source that is overall rare. We have looked at some of the extremes, and there are many others with less physical impact. Mozart was not great only because he had early music lessons in childhood; Newton did not invent calculus only because he had been trained in mathematics. They had gifts. And if them, so us, or so the old spiritual traditions tell us. It is, as the non-affiliated grass-roots saint Peace Pilgrim has said, as if we were all part of the same body, each of us a cell contributing - if we do not go off track - to the overall health of the body. We each have our rolls, some of which are standard, and at least one which makes us stand out. This idea was not made up whole cloth; that we are all part of one body, for better and for worse, was stated again and again in the Old Testament and in the Gospels. For instance, we all have original sin; and we all can be of “the body of Christ.”
Not everyone can cave- dive or create a masterpiece or do anything of a spectacular nature. But we all have something, a special flavor at the very least, that is intended to affect the body Human in a positive way. Dang if I know mine. But we are told that if we act as if we are all one in the end – that is, if we treat others as ourselves - that our specialty, our gift or gifts, will shine – perhaps whether we know it or not. To have, as the apostles did, tongues of flame coming out of their heads as they gained such gifts as universal language and healing sure would help, but I think it is true regardless.
If this seems too Pollyann-ish, don’t worry - trouble and suffering are sure to relieve you of that saccharin flavor sooner or later. But I do believe it is true, that we all have a gift or gifts, and that we will find it or them once we understand that we are not alone, but have always been an intended part of it all.
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