From my journal in June of 1999 (age 22):
Almost lost myself to the city. After summer job interview #3 went extremely badly, I walked out in a bewildered daze, unable to comprehend why I was giving myself to that asshole. I walked right into rush hour traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. Right out into all those speeding cars. At that moment I was completely unconscious, buried inside, in denial of despair. Halfway across I realized what I was doing but was too late to stop. Thankfully half the traffic yielded - the other half didn’t but I was able to wait in the middle. I realized at that moment that I was letting the city strike me down - don’t do it! I need to rediscover the faith and rebuild the trust in myself, my spirit. I am sorry for my actions, to the people in this city that I have treated badly in my moments of loss… I will try to make amends. I will try harder. I will keep myself in focus. I will know what to do and follow all the indicators towards a certain peace. Please believe me. It’s not too late.
For most of my life I have had a strong anti-religion bent. At the same time, I’ve always been open to spirituality and fascinated by faith. Reading my old journals (an ongoing project), I am continually interested to see what I was thinking and doing in the beginning of my adult life. In many cases, I have no memory of the events or feelings I describe, and reading them is like reading the journals of a stranger. Occasionally, an entry ignites a flash of memory. This is one of those passages. I was living in D.C. and had to find a job for the summer before my teaching position started in the fall. I had just interviewed at an upscale new Indian restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue and found the manager to be incredibly offensive (though now I can’t remember exactly why). Ironically, I did end up taking that job and working there for a couple of months.
I was struck by the passage above for a few reasons. When I wrote it, I was in the middle of a what I now think of as a spiritual phase of my life. It started in my senior year of college, and continued into my first attempts to live as an independent adult on my own in a strange new city. I was reading for hours a day about indigenous spiritual practices, various Western philosophers, and the wild stories of Carlos Castaneda. I was meditating and doing other forms of spiritual practice. I was largely alone at this time, crawling more and more deeply into a mental cave that isolated me from most other people, and gave me a sort of self-issued license to openly (and harshly) judge the people I did come into contact with. I think I was oblivious to the contradictions presented by my spiritual pursuits done in parallel with my bad behavior toward other people. I was conflating spirituality with a kind of arrogance and superiority over people who were less “conscious” than me.
There is something else in that journal entry that surprises me when I read it now - my urge to make amends “to the people in this city”. It surprises me because recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of amends and what it means to make them, forming a list in my head of people that I believe I should make amends to for various things I have done in the last twenty-five years. Several of the people on that list are from the exact time in my life that the above journal entry is from. I am a bit amazed that while I was in the process of carrying out the actions that I would later regret and consider my biggest wrongdoings against others, for which I would want to make amends decades later, that I was actually thinking about making amends at the time. The funny thing is, what I’m talking about making amends for in this journal entry are random and somewhat innocuous slights to strangers in the city - things like walking across the street at a red light, or holding up the line in the post office while I asked for tape to seal a package because I didn’t want to buy my own tape. I didn’t journal about how badly I treated my roommate, or how thoughtless and arrogant I was toward my coworkers, for example.
My 22 year old self is also talking about faith, something I would set aside for decades a few months after writing that passage. I’m thinking a lot about faith at the moment, and what it really means. I’m realizing that for me, at this moment, faith is about letting go of the desire to control. It’s about letting things happen, and accepting what happens, without getting resentful or upset. It’s about redirecting my will, so that instead of trying to exert my will on everything around me, I am instead using my will to let go and accept things as they are. For most of my life, I’ve done just the opposite. Not accepting what happens, or being frustrated by a perceived lack of control, create bitterness and resentment that lead me to do things I will later regret and feel the need to make amends for. Trying to control everything, in other words, generally makes me unhappy (as things often do not go according to my preferences). But, not trying to control things often feels like an elusive and impossible goal. The discomfort of letting go - even when I know my attempts at control are illusory - is so great, that I simply can’t do it.
Letting go, I’m learning, requires a deliberate use of will. For most of my adult life, the only way I could momentarily ease the desire for control was by drinking. I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but choosing to drink was an act of will. What I’m working on now is redirecting my will, so that instead of choosing to drink or trying to create the outcomes I want, I’m trying to willfully believe that whatever happens will be OK. It seems obvious when I write it now, but I don’t know that I ever made the connection before that letting go is an act of faith. I’m sure I’ve heard those words, but I don’t think I ever really thought through what it means for me, or what it would look like if I tried to do it. The only consistent way I could let go - and feel the joy that comes with letting go - was to get drunk. The idea that I could have that same feeling of joy without alcohol is something I’ve conceptually understood for a while, but only now starting to realize.