Be Like Water

Salvation isn’t simple in it’s path. It isn’t easy, in the least. It does not come as swift as an out reached hand lifting you out of the mire in one graceful motion. It does not come from reciting a prayer or a baptism.

It isn’t simple, on more than one axis of conception. One must bring oneself to salvation, one must reach out to that hand reaching out to you. For those who know what it is like to be lost and hurt, one needn’t unpack the degree to which an out reached hand and a single word is insufficient in describing what it entails to find a better life inside of your mind.

I’d like to extract the word “salvation” from the box of Christian thought and treat it as a free term, unasociated with divine personification and legend making. I do not wish to use it tethered to a socio-political hook, for I do not consider you a fish. What salvation means to me is a comprehensive recovery from past traumas and being freed from the necessity of unhealthy or unhappy coping mechanisms. The renewed ability to approach and learn things in places you have avoided or shut yourself off from. You’re no longer in a protracted damage control exercise and you are entering into a state of growth where you feel free as a child.

I wish to make this careful incision because I know what it is like to deal with matters historically considered to be in the dominion of a people and a set of ideas that prefer the control and safety of a box. One may have valid fears and suspicions of anything related to that institution and it’s language. One might not even be willing to admit as much, preferring to remain in another corner of safety and certainty where one may claim to be free from that which ruined the religious way of life for you, or where you may not have to answer certain questions of yourself coming from that place, even if you haven’t been there before.

To sit with the awareness that what brought you to where you are now is both your own, inner wisdom, and that which simply happened, is quite a meditation in itself. One knows so much about so many things, and yet, one knows sweet fuck all. One must maintain grip on that humility, and one must be arrogant enough to leap across sacred boundaries to find what you most badly need to learn, for growth, for healing.

What one needs most badly to learn is invariably the least convenient lesson. As much as life will force feed you that lesson if you keep going long enough, one can expedite that process if you eat it willingly. But how does one voluntarily walk toward the suffering of meaningful education? I’m not going to claim to know the answer to that. It must be somewhat different for everyone. For me there is a certain masochism present, a certain desensitisation and a fear of the perpetual loneliness of suffering inside your mind, where no one can reach you.

I hoped to find a companion who might have as many busy little tentacles stemming off their mind as I do, who could overpower mine and subdue them to a restful state. But here’s  where the part of salvation appears that isn’t asking more from you. It responds to your sense of agency, to your sense of hope, to the observer, the seeker who refuses to quit looking. This is where the one simple thing about salvation appears, the essence that binds it all, like the subtle force of gravity, subtly and inperceptibly holding it all within the realm of possibility. It comes on like a gentle voice through the ether, singing. Not approaching you with the intent, not with the contrivance of sense making. It comes on like an ambush of good will, if you can imagine such a thing. It’s like a rising tide lifting your boat up off the rocks, so that you no longer have to try and keep balancing on your keel for dear life. It made me realise that years of anxiety that drove obsessive thinking made my psychological landscape look like a canyon filled with spires. Navigating life and my emotions was like hopping safely from one pinnacle to another or else something that always seemed scarier than death… It was so important to get things just right because there was no sense of safety beyond the exact next step.

Until you have been “lost” and then “found”, not by god but by people, including yourself, “amazing grace” and “love” will not really mean anything to you. It’s a hymn, nothing more. It’s hymn from church and can you please not bother me with the subtly compelled practices any longer!

I call on your inner masochist to humor me.

A friend who sympathises with the church-going folk on a cultural basis recently expressed the notion that the idea “god is love” is meaningless. My mind leads me to then ask what is god to you, have you dispensed with the requirement to answer that in your own words, as a sovereign, free individual? Not just dismissing it and all who indulge it as delusional (how progressive of you). Have you recognised that language isn’t in the dominion of any critical mass of people, and that you can use it as the most dynamic tool you may ever have in your possession? And then, what is love to you? Have you known love? Is your formative association with it marred by deep wounds of mistrust, fear and unjust suffering? Are you treating it all as a completed lesson in a misguided course, a qualification for which you have no use in this world?

I can say that, as someone who has walked the courses and jumped the fences and defied the boxing-in others may want to impose on you for their own convenience: don’t let battle lines define your sphere of operation. We impoverish ourselves by dancing to the tune of the masses, yes even those who make sense to you. We impoverish ourselves by seeking the safety of the momentum of established ideas without engaging with the meaning-making of it. We impoverish ourselves when we do not pick up an idea for examination, because we might be derided by our friends or loved ones for merely examining it without the filters as they expect of us. We impoverish ourselves when we do not allow ourselves to feel silly for acting like a child, who has not yet convinced himself of his own grasp on the world and the heart’s matters.

My salvation is a bloody long, winding road. Some struggle to stomach the mere notion of places I have been to learn what I had to learn. It isn’t their plight in life to map the marshes. It’s theirs to welcome travellers to higher ground with an embrace that melts your hardened suspicion, that revives you out of your weariness, that let’s you sleep sound without a weapon in hand. Even if they don’t grasp the meaning of the ground upon which they stand, a hearty meal is love, a safe bed is love, an embrace of welcoming and acceptance is love. It gives you life, it brings you back to equilibrium. They get to have their ignorance without my  resentment. Besides, the complexity is on multiple axes. There is a parallel dimensionality to it. Where one person sees restful high ground, another may be fighting a different foe, for which your weapons may come to good use.

I found a companion who meets me with absolute grace in places I long wished for, and in places I haven’t even considered. Without conscious intent she teaches me things I didn’t think I want to learn. Safety has come not from obvious strength and intellectual lethality, but from a lack of cynicism, a lack of suspicion and resentment, a lack of fear and a condition of simply being as you are. Unfolding outward and forward with a robust trust in the likelihood that all will work out for the best so long as you hold true.

Instead of being a hard ass or saying a prayer with charming words, just be grateful. You don’t even have to direct your gratefulness at anyone, tell yourself what you’re grateful for. There’s love in it. Feel it.