This week in my friend Marla’s writing class, one of my classmates, Bill, read a glorious story about an experience he had with his father. As a child, Bill played baseball with a group of local boys. Nothing fancy or too organized, but rather like The Sandlot. And whereas Bill enjoyed baseball, he said, he wasn’t very good at it. Still, when his team played against another neighborhood group, Bill got a hit. But then as he began to round the bases, he spotted his dad outside the fence. Bill didn’t know he was going to be there. “Get the lead out!” Bill’s dad cried. Next thing he knew, Bill got tagged out. At this point in his story, Bill started crying and so did I. What person doesn’t connect with the idea of wanting a parent’s approval?
In concluding his tale, Bill said that when he had sons of his own, he’d attend their ballgames and proudly stand and pump his fist in the air to cheer them on. But he never said a word. I’m adding to Bill’s story here, but knowing what effect his dad’s words had on him, Bill never said to his boys, “Get the lead out!”
This afternoon and evening I read a book called Spiritual Alchemy by C.C. Zain. For those interested in the topic, it’s one of the best I’ve come across. The idea behind the book is that just as a material alchemist would endeavor to transmute lead (or any of the seven base metals associated with alchemy) into gold, a spiritual alchemist would and should endeavor to take the lead in their life and turn it into gold. In other words, their task is to take a circumstance, situation, trauma, relationship, or day at the office that would normally weigh them down and–somehow–change it from a liability to an asset.
My writing class’s assignment for next week is along these lines of transmutation. What’s something that you previously thought was terrible that turned out to be something wonderful? For example, recently I ran into someone I used to have the biggest crush on. I remember being distinctly upset for weeks that they didn’t return my affection. Now, years later, I can see I dodged a bullet. (God, I should be a professional bullet dodger.) The difference between this change in viewpoint and the change in viewpoint that spiritual alchemy asks of someone is not a matter of content, nor is it a matter of outcome. That is, in either case the base facts (base metal) are the same. I got ignored. Likewise, the end viewpoints (gold) are the same. This is a good thing, I’m glad this happened the way it did. The difference, rather, is that in the first case life and time taught me that my unrequited love wasn’t “bad” but “good,” but in the second, hypothetical case–the case of the spiritual alchemist–the shift in viewpoint from bad to good would happen faster and intentionally.
I’ve said before that when I was a child, our house burned down and my mother was clinically depressed. When I was a teenager, I was in a terrible car accident and my father went to prison. From an alchemist’s standpoint, all of these events are lead, heavy things. In truth, any event can be heavy. A death, a breakup, a job loss, an abusive relationship. Shit happens on planet earth. This being said, my job, and your job if you choose to accept it, is to take heavy events, forage the very best we can from them, and toss away the rest into what Caroline Myss calls the oh-well pile. (I got dumped. OH WELL.) In alchemical terms, this is called separating the metal from the dross. In Biblical terms, separating the wheat from the chaff.
When said like this, obviously anyone would be a fool to mistake the dross for the metal or the chaff for the wheat–to hold on to the worst parts of an experience rather than the best parts. And yet we all do this. Something terrible happens, and we whine and bitch and moan and cry. We form resentments and hold grudges for decades. Decades! We think, Why did this happen to me? (Want the answer? Because it did. Don’t like that answer? Tough. You’ll never get a better one. I hate this as much as you do.) And yet we could, with just as much mental effort, focus on the gifts our challenges give us. For example, for as awful as one of my exes was, he encouraged me to go to therapy (by his bad behavior, not his good words), and going to therapy has been the single most transformative experience of my entire life. Does this mean he wasn’t an absolute turd? No. But does it mean that on some level I’m grateful he was? Yes, yes it does.
Zain says that “whether an experience becomes a constructive factor in the mentality, or a destructive factor, depends entirely upon the mental attitude toward it.” This means that although you don’t get to pick the experiences of your life (sorry), you do get to decide how you frame them. You get to decide what story you tell about them, both to yourself and to others. Said tritely, you get to decide whether the very worst things that happen to you (or even whether someone cutting you off in traffic) will make you better or bitter.
No one else can do this for you.
Obviously I don’t know what goes on in anyone else’s head, but from my perspective and at least with regard to the story he shared, Bill is an alchemist. That is, he took a circumstance that could have weighed him down for the rest of his life–his father’s frustration, disapproval, and embarrassment–and transformed or transmuted it into something lighter. By his refusing to feel or, at the very least, communicate those emotions to his sons when they played ball, he not only affected his experience, but also the experience of his children and, I’m assuming, those around him. (We all know how one person can make or break a party.)
Said another way, he didn’t pass on his pain.
This afternoon I mowed my parents’ lawn. There’s a tree in the backyard whose branches I always have to duck under to avoid being swiped in the face, and I usually just hunch over. But today I grabbed the snippers out of the garage and went to work on the low-hanging branches. One by one I cut them off. Relieved of their previously attached weight, the remaining branches shot up. In fact, they soared. This is what it’s like when you snip the resentments out of your life, when you cut out focusing on the terrible things that happened to you and instead focus on how they turned you into a strong, loving person. There’s this sense of release, of buoyancy, of freedom. Everything feels lighter. You stand taller. You soar. This is what it feels like to get the lead out. As Marla said when she heard Bill’s story, “This is gold.”
Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)
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Sometimes you have to give up wanting something before you can have it.
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