By Mindy Misener This post is from Mindy's substack page. You can read more, and subscribe if you'd like, at bearingthelight.substack.com.
We are moving across the country this summer.
I keep thinking I should be taking it in stride, yet I keep finding myself in a kind of flustered, floating, not-quite-here state. It’s not hard to guess why. We’ll be uprooting from the people, the city, and the landscapes that have accompanied us for six years now—the place where we had our children, the place where we have deeply-set rhythms. I will be officially, publicly embarking on a career path (divinity school, eye toward ordination) I have felt drawn to (“called” to, if you dare to use such language, which I can, obviously, only with the protection of quotation marks) for ten years now—a path I have also resisted and questioned for reasons I still find valid. I will close out a decade-long career as a college writing instructor. Our children will be encountering new communities, new friends, and leaving behind the only home they’ve known.
“It’s a lot,” caring people say to me. I think they mean to acknowledge that living even a basically satisfying, privileged life occasionally results in a mass of adjustments that will have to be digested whole. At least, that’s what I mean when I use the phrase, which is often enough.
Maybe all we mean to say is that, even though life always has its challenges and changes, there are some points at which the totality of challenge and/or change goes from “typical” to “a lot.” Psychologists might agree with this interpretation of the phrase based on, for example, the Holmes-Rahe stress scale, which was developed decades ago but still gets plenty of attention on wellness blogs today (in other words, while I don’t know exactly how much credence the scale gets now from researchers, it obviously reflects something about the common conception of stress).
The scale attempts to quantify the total stress a person might be under; very high scores are correlated with adverse health outcomes. Unsurprisingly, very difficult experiences like the death of a spouse or imprisonment are given some of the highest point values. Yet even events we would generally consider “positive” appear in the top half of the list—marriage, for instance. Changes in work environment, school, or residence all have significant point values.
The scale has its uses and its limitations. I experience it the same way I do personality tests—kind of interesting, kind of insightful, kind of illuminating, and that’s kind of it.
Though I’m willing to bet that the overall score for anyone taking the test is often a good ballpark indication of high versus low stress, I also think that the very idea of breaking down one’s stressful events into a kind of pie chart—i.e., this percentage of my stress is from changing jobs; that percentage is from a new living situation—creates a false picture of what comprises “stress”.
Which is why I keep thinking about the phrase “It’s a lot”—particularly the vague pronoun “it.” What is “a lot”? Life? Big adjustments? Being a human? Existing?
All of those, to some degree. Yet I also think the phrase contains a particular shadow of a meaning that would be easiest to leave unacknowledged. Or, that I at least realized I was reluctant to acknowledge.
It’s that meaning I want to consider here.
But first, a few words from Meister Eckhart, a mystic who lived seven centuries ago:
“Start with yourself therefore and take leave of yourself. Truly, if you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest, wherever it may be… if someone were to renounce a kingdom or the whole world while still holding on to themselves, then they would have renounced nothing at all.”
Some readers may understandably wonder if Eckhart is prescribing asceticism, or even suggesting self-hatred. Not so; Eckhart writes also that “withdrawal from the world or poverty or self-abasement,” among other things, “are still nothing at all and cannot be the source of peace.”
What interests me about Eckhart’s words is their striking contrast with a line of popular wisdom in which I was so steeped for so long that, until embarrassingly recently, I couldn’t see it for what it was. The line goes like this: each of us has some abiding, consistent, precious self to which we ought to remain relentlessly loyal, lest we “sacrifice the gift,” “sell out,” or otherwise fail to “be all we can be.”
The message is everywhere—in Disney mega-hits, in pop songs, in self-help messages of all stripes. Sometimes it’s obviously cheesy and sometimes it’s remarkably well-played. How many moving documentaries of astounding grit or determination—someone achieving some stunning humanitarian end or a wild endurance record—are framed, explicitly or implicitly, by the idea that this person was simply bold enough to embrace who they really were, to see through their true calling?
I found the admonition to be true to oneself even more pointed in the Evangelical church than it was in popular culture, because adding God to the mix meant that I, Mindy, had been made by God for a particular purpose. The point of my life was to find and fulfill that purpose. No pressure, though.
Look: we all have to make decisions somehow, and attempting to follow the lead of one’s soul, or deepest intuition, or created-by-God self is about as good a method as any and probably better than most. Moreover, I believe that all of us are indeed, in unique ways, in a lifelong dance with the Holy. So of course our selves exist—and matter.
And yet. The very ubiquity of the insistence that we be, above all, true to these “selves” gives me pause. Isn’t it a bit, well, self-centered? Is it really wisest to assume that not only do I contain that spark of the Holy, or Pure Awareness, or True Self, or whatever else you want to call it, but that I also actually know how to access and respond to it?
This is why I find Eckhart’s advice to “take leave of yourself” so important. I don’t read him as suggesting we ignore or deny the fact that we are, or have, selves. I believe our selves are unique; I believe we each have gifts and abilities which we can certainly hope to use for good ends. (I’m going to divinity school, for crying out loud.)
Instead, I read Eckhart as an antidote to the endless pressure to find, and be, selves that, to whatever degree they exist, are, I believe, too mysterious and subtle for us to know. Eckhart presents a different challenge: take leave of that self. Drop your narratives about who you “are” and what you’re “meant” to do. Stop thinking you are meant to be “greater” or “lesser,” whatever those mean. Stop obsessing over the encouragement you got in this quarter, or the door that closed in that, and what those events do or don’t say about the possibilities, limitations, and as-yet-unseen realities of your life. It’s all too big to know or understand.
I called Eckhart’s words a challenge, and they are. Yet I think the challenge lies not so much in the project to take leave of oneself as it does in the process of accepting that we are already and always leaving ourselves.
The process of becoming is constant in any life, of course; we are plenty of selves even if we don’t ever move from the place we were born. Yet when the changes erupt all at once, I think the truth of it is closer at hand, harder to hide from. Even if we don’t see or acknowledge it, I think we sense that we are doing more than figuring out the logistics of a new job, a new family configuration, a big move. We’re facing the fact that we are taking leave of this self; we will become someone as-yet-unknown, with as-yet-unknown habits, thoughts, and priorities.
But it’s hard to name all that. So, we say, “It’s a lot.”
I feel relief in realizing that this part of my own transition is affecting me so much. Seeing it means I have a choice: consent to, or resist, reality.
There’s only one good option there, of course.
I considered concluding with a thought along the lines of going with the flow—I was going to shoot for something less trite, though—and then I wondered what Eckhart would think of that phrase. And I think he’d urge us deeper, past the idea that we should or even could separate ourselves from the proverbial flow (which he would certainly consider God) in order to go with it. Don’t go with the flow, he might say. Become it.
