Expansion
Plans
“Have
you ever longed for a life in which every last part of you is entirely used up?
Have you ever followed that longing? Taken a step back from the known in your
life and found yourself falling, falling, yet with the irrational certainty that
the world is more right with you than it has ever been?”
Roger
Housden, Editor (Risking Everything:110 Poems of Love and Revelation, p.ix; Harmony
Books, 2003)
Last
night, some friends and I had a conversation about people who engage in extreme
sports—like the Ironman or climbing Mt. Everest or the rock face of El Capitan.
What drives some of us to do things in which our chance of dying or suffering catastrophic
damage is at least 50-50. What makes it worth the risk? It was said that some
of us want to stretch ourselves to the furthest possible limit to feel a sense
of control over our lives. Or possibly, that one achieves a spiritual high, or
peak experience, from succeeding at a supremely difficult task. I was once told
by an Outward-Bound instructor that he felt most alive when he was closest to
death.
My
friends all agreed that some of us want to experience the limits of our physical
and mental strength, and then push beyond them. As for me, I think natural
opiates play a large role in this. Extreme physical exercise causes pain, and if
we can endure it for about 20 minutes, we get a hormone rush of endorphins and enkephalins
more potent than morphine. It’s a form of addiction commonly called “runner’s
high.”
Personally,
I don’t need to face death to feel alive, but there are days when I think of
doing what Roger Housden suggests above—scrapping the known and safe life for
something different. It’s easy as we age to become sedentary and to put our brain
on auto-pilot. There are times when just speaking the right words in the proper
order is challenging enough. But being sedentary is what, according to Carl Jung,
causes us to become wooden in old age. I watched my mother do this—narrow her
life down to where it became about what her next meal would be, and who was
winning on Jeopardy.
One has a choice as to
whether their life is miniscule or expansive. The former is easy—just sit down
and quit trying. The latter requires a bit of risk-taking, but it produces a
richer, brighter and more productive chapter—whether it’s your first chapter or
your last. As Mary Oliver asks, “Listen, are you breathing just a little,
and calling it a life?” I hope this finds you longing for expansion.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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