New Skin
“Yet beneath all the talk of tragedy and grace, I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will, in time, every one of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as a new skin.”
Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening)
One of the teachings of the Buddha is, “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” Fortunately, that reality sinks in over time, because if the full truth of it landed on us all at once and when we were young, it might crush us. At the very least, knowing that no one can walk the path for us can cause a crisis of confidence.
To be sure, we do not walk our paths in
isolation. Every day, in so many ways, people add substance to our souls; they
teach us, show us, and sometimes, painfully demonstrate the direction our path must
go. Influencers abound from birth until death, but in the end and even in the
beginning, it is we who must choose. Human beings evolve at different speeds,
often depending upon how much adversity they must overcome in their lives. I
think of well-known characters from history like Harriett Tubman, who not only escaped
her own enslavement, but went back time after time, risking great danger to
herself to help others escape.
Not many of us are the equivalent of
Harriett Tubman, but each one of us has hurdles to jump, and with each hurdle
successfully behind us, we grow a new skin. It is unfortunately true that we
learn more from adversity than we do from comfort and entitlement. When we are
privileged, life is comfortable, and we don’t have to learn much. We can simply
walk our path and knock whoever gets in our way out. But sooner or later in
every life, loss comes in the form of painful breakups, deaths, loss of
function, loss of status. I think of the Kennedy family, privileged to the
point of almost being royalty, but a family with devastating losses. No life is
insulated from loss.
We
all know people who have enjoyed privilege and abused others because of it, who
are now experiencing the consequences of that abuse. As painful as it is, they
will come away with a different view of the world, and hopefully a more
inclusive and better one.
We all have opportunities to realize
the advantages of adversity, but we rarely do. Think of a time when your path
took a wrong turn, when you were confronted with a difficult decision, a
transition not of your choosing. How did you make your way through it? What did
you learn from it? How are you different now from the way you were before? Are
you now wearing a new skin? Do you like yourself better?
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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