Losing Control and Living

In late October, 1988, on the eve of his 50th wedding anniversary, my father had a heart attack.  We had flown to California, where my parents were staying with my brother.  The celebration, planned for the next day on the Queen Mary, which lay permanently at anchor in Long Beach, never took place.  Nor did his recovery.  The heart attack was minor, but a diagnosis of stomach cancer followed.  We buried him on Valentine’s Day.

My life returned to normal, or so I thought.  My work was my savior, or so I imagined.  Both were interrupted by reality exactly one year to the day after his death.  What we call PTSD today had no label then, but that night I could not sleep.  I had no idea why.  I had always loved drifting gently into rejuvenating silence, but it would take five years before I could do so again.

My first response was a midnight trip to the store for a sleep-aid.  It provided only the mistaken assumption that it would work.  A sleep study, biofeedback and meditation tapes were equally ineffective.  In fact nothing worked until someone asked me a pivotal question: “What if you saw your inability to sleep not as a problem but as a gift.  How could it be helping you?”  The gift, unwanted as it seemed, was the realization that my father’s death was the starkest of demonstrations that I could not control my life.  Inability to sleep was the symptom, and the more I tried to control it, the more out of control it got. 

In a way I could not see, I was living an imagined life.  Taught from youth to take charge of my days and destiny, the assumption that I could control them was an illusion.  I was living inside a presumed sanctuary, but it was in reality a prison.  I was both the prisoner and the jailor.     

Yet I had the key, but only at the end of my five-year sentence did I find a way to unlock the cell.  My life was full, but for too long I had been draining joy from it.  I finally gave up trying so hard to sleep.  Only then did I begin to sleep easily again.  In accepting that my obsession with control was controlling me, I opened a passage to a richer life. 

I don’t disdain control.  It has served me well.  Yet I had lived too much of my life staying in the lanes of that road.  Giving up some control has given the gift of being surprised - as has giving up the need for certainty, the handmaiden of the need for control.  It has relieved me of always living by a schedule when so many wondrous moments can’t be scheduled in a day-timer.  It has freed me from demanding answers when there is beauty and imagination in questions.  As Rilke once put it “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” 

A full life, I now see, is gained not just by setting and achieving goals but by being engaged with living in ways that take you places you had not planned to go.  The treasures of the ocean lie below the surface.  Though the water may be murky and dark it is filled with wonders.

My wife has known this from childhood, when a heart defect threatened to end her life by age 12.  She has always found joy in living.  Each day for her is a treasure chest to be opened while for me it was too often a safe deposit box to be filled.   She tried to teach me that for years.  I was a very slow learner.  As Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Vern Law once put it:  “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.”  Losing my father and my sleep was the test.  I am thankful I finally figured out the lesson.

Photo Credit: Xan Griffin-unsplash