Living in the Mystery

Steeplechase.

I woke up in the middle of the night one night, startled out of a deep sleep, saying that word out loud. It had been said—yelled—to me in the dream.

For weeks I wondered what it meant, and why the word had been spoken so loudly. I looked it up in the dictionary: “A race across open country or an obstacle course”? I couldn’t figure it out.

It’s probably someone’s name, I thought.

I was in the midst of trying to make sense out of a trip I had already taken to China and Tibet, where I had climbed the steps to four holy mountains. I was planning to return to Tibet to visit Mount Kailash, known to many Buddhists as the holiest mountain there. That’s when the thought occurred almost as loudly as the original word.

It’s not someone’s name. It’s the name of the game.

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It started by being frustrated and climbing into a cave.

“I’m not going in there,” I said, looking at the small opening between the rocks. “It’s a dirty, dark cave.”

I had come to China because I wanted to visit Tibet. To get visas and permits for Tibet, it was best to go to China first to expedite doing that. Then my friend Joe and I decided to climb the four holy mountains in China first, as long as we were here.

Who knows if we’ll ever be here again? I wasn’t sure why I agreed, but it felt right at the time.

Now we were standing outside a cave by the sea in Putuoshan, a small Chinese island that was the home of holy mountain number one.

I was looking for magic and mystery, but the harder I tried to find it, the more ordinary everything became. People had pointed and stared since I got on the train in Hong Kong. Chinese people kept trying to convince me to eat fish heads and eel. Nobody spoke English except to point at me, giggle, and mockingly say hello. Spitting was a popular thing.

The ferry ride from Shanghai to Putuoshan had been long and loud. Music had screeched and blared from the boat’s karaoke bar all night. I closed the window, but it got too hot. Then a flatulating man decided to sleep on the deck right outside the open window to my room.

My left knee was swollen to the size of a small cantaloupe from the sixty-pound pack strapped to my back.

I wasn’t really walking. More like tottering along.

And I hadn’t even climbed the first mountain yet.

“Just come on in,” Joe said. “We’re here. Let’s look around.”

I climbed through the small opening. It looked ordinary enough. Light filtered in through cracks in the rocks in the wall. Puddles on the floor. A little trash.

That funny cavelike smell: earth and age.

Next to the exterior wall were a small wooden table and a broken chair. I wondered if a monk had sat and meditated there. I wondered what he thought while sitting in this room. A little stone doorway led to another room. I peeked in. Eight inches of water on the floor.

In the other direction, all I could see was blackness. I didn’t know if there was a wall or if the blackness actually led somewhere.

“Want to check it out?” Joe asked.

“Why not?” I said.

The blackness was all around me. No light left. I couldn’t see. I didn’t know what was under my feet. Didn’t know what if anything was ahead.

Watch out, I thought. Be careful. Heightened awareness kicked in. Slow down. Breathe. Feel your way through. You know how to take care of yourself when you don’t know what’s next. You’ve been in that situation many times.

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“So what do I do now that I’m in recovery,” I asked my chemical dependency counselor when I went to treatment in 1973. “Not that much,” she replied.

“Just change everything in your life.”

By 1980 I was exhausted. Depleted. Worn out to the bone from trying to make an alcoholic stop drinking and love me the way I wanted to be loved. I had run out of ideas and run out of myself. “Why don’t you learn a new way?” someone had suggested. “Let go of what you can’t change, and begin focusing on taking care of yourself.” I was dumbfounded. I didn’t have a clue what it meant to stop controlling others and live my own life.

I stood in the parking lot outside the courtroom six years later. In one moment, I felt both exhilarated and terrified. I was free from a marriage that hadn’t worked longer than it had. But I was also on my own—a single parent, raising two kids.

I sat in the hotel corridor. It was 1991 now. I couldn’t remember which room was mine, or how to get there. I couldn’t function, couldn’t reason my way through. Faces and names had blurred at the funeral. I was in shock, in a daze. “Which casket do you want?” they had asked. “Don’t you understand, don’t you get it?” I said. “I don’t want any of them. I want my son back. Alive.” All my dreams, plans, hopes for the future—good dreams about being a mom, having two teenage children to love and care for, being able to support them and enjoy my work—everything had blown up in my face. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do next. I didn’t know what to do now.

I stood at the door of the airplane. June 20, 1999. Ready. Set. “No!” I screamed. “It’s 12,500 feet down. I could die!” “Your odds of dying in traffic on the freeway are a lot bigger. Yeah, you could die. But why don’t you get out of the plane, because you could have a lot of fun, too.”
In the cave, I fumbled through the darkness, carefully taking each step. Where was this leading? Anywhere? Finally I saw a glimmer of light. I stepped toward it. A wooden door led to the street.

That wasn’t just a dirty, dark cave, I thought later. That was the ancient cave of the unknown. 

There’s more to life than we can see with our physical eyes. People have been talking about this for years. Richard Bach wrote about it when he introduced us to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a bird that suspected there was more to life than what he saw, then used that insight to learn how to soar.

Joseph Campbell told us what to expect.

The Hero’s Journey, it’s called. We’d meet mentors and enemies and experience resistance as we journeyed into the innermost cave to find the gold.

Then, once we had it clutched in our hands, we’d almost get killed on the long road home. Bill Wilson, in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, described it as being catapulted into the fourth dimension of existence. Margery Williams wrote a story about it for children, The Velveteen Rabbit.
She called this mysterious process becoming real.

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I like mysteries. I like the concept of the Hero’s Journey. I identify with Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The Velveteen Rabbit makes me weep.

And living in the fourth dimension that Bill describes makes life worthwhile. Like a friend said recently, “When I’m just living out of my head and not by intuition, life becomes ordinary, plain, ugh.”

Although many of us are enamored with the idea of the mysterious process of growth and change described in

Jonathan Livingston Seagull or The Hero’s Journey, it’s another issue entirely to find ourselves living through it in our lives—especially when change begins. We set our sights on a goal. We make a decision about how something is going to be. Then we plod forward.

Wham. It isn’t what we expected.

A didn’t lead to our planned B.

Most of us like the concept of mysteries: reading them, watching them on TV. But we don’t like living through the process and with a mystery of our own.

It’s not just that we want to know what’s next; we don’t understand what’s happening right now.

Call it the void, the unknown—whatever you choose. But it’s a place we go first, before we learn anything new. Fill up a glass with water. Right to the top.

Now, try to pour some more water in. You can try—but you can’t do it. You have to empty the glass first, before you can fill it with anything else.

It’s a simple principle, easily overlooked.

There’s a lot of power in an empty space.

We can’t hold on to the old ways—the thoughts, the projections, the beliefs about how things have to be—and still be open to learning something new.

“Whether it comes in the form of curiosity, bewilderment, shock, or relaxation isn’t really the issue,” wrote Pema Chödrön in The Places That Scare You.

“We train when we’re caught off guard and when our life is up in the air.”

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Feel as frustrated as you want. It’s better than staying numb. Try to control everything until you run out of yourself. Get depleted if you must. Then turn frustration into fascination. Gain control another way. Deliberately choose to enter the cave of the unknown.

Step carefully. It’s okay if you can’t see. It’s better that way. Your other senses will kick in. Relax. Breathe. Feel your way through, until you see a glimmer of light.

The hardest thing to remember is that we’re not in there alone.

“People like to choose the familiar over the unknown,” a friend said one day, “even if what’s familiar doesn’t work and isn’t what they like or want.” In this section, we’ll look at some stories about people who chose the unknown—or were chosen by it—and how that worked for them.

It’s easy to stop outside the door to that cave and say, I’m not going in there. It’s dark. I’m tired and scared. Thank you anyway, I’ll stay with what I can see and what I know. Whether you’re motivated by fear, curiosity, guilt, despair, or circumstance, my hope is that these stories will encourage you to take it one step further.

Let go of what you think you know.

Step inside. Look around. It’s okay if you can’t figure things out. Shhh. Listen to the secret: the more you’re willing to surrender control, the more powerful you’ll become.

Welcome to the mystery of life.

From the book: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter