lost your partner, your job, your faith, your status – someone or something you relied upon far more than you realized.
These days your chest aches all the time. You have to breathe deeply into it all day long to keep the panic from crushing you. It seems you’ve lost control of your mind too. You turn your attention toward other things, but it just won’t stay there. It keeps sagging back to your loss and what to do about it.
Not that you trust yourself to know. Apparently, you bet on the wrong source of security, so now you don’t even trust your intuition, which makes it all doubly hard. You’re lost and your inner compass seems broken.
How are you going to get out of this mess? I count three main roads to recovery: Restoration, revolution and revelation.
Restoration: Get back what you lost. You lost your partner? Maybe you’ll get a call, an apology, an invitation to go back to how it was. You lost your health? Maybe a second opinion will show that it’s all just a big mistake. You lost your job? Maybe they’ll rehire you.
Revolution: If restoration doesn’t work, then move toward whatever is the least like what you just had, which actually sucked, you now realize. Your recovery will be a testament against it, confidence restored by disavowing what you lost and clambering toward whatever isn’t it.
These two are, by far, the two roads to recovery most taken. When our glass plummets from full to half-full, we’ll want to refill it either with what was lost, or some reliable opposite so we’ll never be lost again.
Society-wide, restoration is a big yearning these days. Citizens want yesteryear back, now that the world is racing into a different future at an accelerating rate.
There’s also revolution in the air. Burnt by whatever “establishment” failed us, people want to throw it off for anything that isn’t it.
These two roads to recovery – restoration and revolution – can work. When they do, it’s great. Sometimes re-marrying an ex works like a charm, the partnership restored. Sometimes you can go home again, or step into the same river twice. Revolution, too: We do learn lessons from past mistakes that put us on much more secure footing in the future. Out of the frying pan into something much cooler.
But restoration and revolution don’t always work. We give something a second or third chance that turned out no better than the first. Often, hot for recovery, we jump out of the frying pan into the fire.
Revolution is how nations fall under the control of one dictator after another. Easily 80% of the world’s dictators were the “revolutionaries” who were going to change everything by being the exact opposite of whichever dictator came before.
When restoration and revolution fail us often enough, a third road to recovery opens. I’ll call it revelation, though that’s a dangerous word, usually associated with seeing the light.
With restoration and revolution, we’re shopping for armor against doubt so we can restore permanent confidence, the place where we hope and think we belong. With revelation, the messiness of life is revealed to us, and we get more interested in how we shop for armor against doubt. And not just how we shop, how everyone does.
What’s revealed is that we don’t belong in permanent confidence. No one does. You find a seemingly reliable formula. It works for a while and then it doesn’t.
With revelation, our expectations loosen. We’re a bit more prepared for the ups and downs. We’re less anxiously busy trying to find rock-solid security. We reckon finally with the hardest news to swallow. Security comes and goes. Everyone gets a sampling of love and loss, so there’s comfort in numbers. It turns out you’re not an exception.
You still try to refill the glass, but you also know that when the glass is half full, sometimes it’s best to get a shorter glass, so what you have left is enough.
We all have to do this anyway. Aging demands it. Somehow between now and the end of our lives we each have to get to where we get by with a whole lot less in the glass.
The glass is your expectations. The third road to recovery is resigning oneself to expectation management. Management is different from always holding firm or giving up on expectations, neither of which are tenable or realistic. Your hopes will rise and fall as they should.
Sometimes you’ll hold firm to expectations; sometimes you’ll go through the chest-aching process of surrendering an expectation. This isn’t easy, because holding and letting go of expectations require opposite effort. You can’t just flip a toggle switch to go from trying with all your might to meet your standards, to not caring about your standards. To care about anything means to marshal a flotilla of yearnings toward it. To stop caring means turning that flotilla. There will be internal chaos.
This third road to recovery is restoration into your humanness. It’s inhuman to never be disappointed either by having all expectations met, or by having no expectations. It’s human to manage expectations so they match as well as you can guess what’s possible for you in this delighting and disappointing world.
These days your chest aches all the time. You have to breathe deeply into it all day long to keep the panic from crushing you. It seems you’ve lost control of your mind too. You turn your attention toward other things, but it just won’t stay there. It keeps sagging back to your loss and what to do about it.
Not that you trust yourself to know. Apparently, you bet on the wrong source of security, so now you don’t even trust your intuition, which makes it all doubly hard. You’re lost and your inner compass seems broken.
How are you going to get out of this mess? I count three main roads to recovery: Restoration, revolution and revelation.
Restoration: Get back what you lost. You lost your partner? Maybe you’ll get a call, an apology, an invitation to go back to how it was. You lost your health? Maybe a second opinion will show that it’s all just a big mistake. You lost your job? Maybe they’ll rehire you.
Revolution: If restoration doesn’t work, then move toward whatever is the least like what you just had, which actually sucked, you now realize. Your recovery will be a testament against it, confidence restored by disavowing what you lost and clambering toward whatever isn’t it.
These two are, by far, the two roads to recovery most taken. When our glass plummets from full to half-full, we’ll want to refill it either with what was lost, or some reliable opposite so we’ll never be lost again.
Society-wide, restoration is a big yearning these days. Citizens want yesteryear back, now that the world is racing into a different future at an accelerating rate.
There’s also revolution in the air. Burnt by whatever “establishment” failed us, people want to throw it off for anything that isn’t it.
These two roads to recovery – restoration and revolution – can work. When they do, it’s great. Sometimes re-marrying an ex works like a charm, the partnership restored. Sometimes you can go home again, or step into the same river twice. Revolution, too: We do learn lessons from past mistakes that put us on much more secure footing in the future. Out of the frying pan into something much cooler.
But restoration and revolution don’t always work. We give something a second or third chance that turned out no better than the first. Often, hot for recovery, we jump out of the frying pan into the fire.
Revolution is how nations fall under the control of one dictator after another. Easily 80% of the world’s dictators were the “revolutionaries” who were going to change everything by being the exact opposite of whichever dictator came before.
When restoration and revolution fail us often enough, a third road to recovery opens. I’ll call it revelation, though that’s a dangerous word, usually associated with seeing the light.
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I mean seeing the light and the dark, more of the real world revealed to us through our own personal sampling of love and loss, attachment
and severing. Instead of holding firm our expectation of high
confidence, we surrender into alternation between doubt and confidence.
To do so, we become more doubt-tolerant.With restoration and revolution, we’re shopping for armor against doubt so we can restore permanent confidence, the place where we hope and think we belong. With revelation, the messiness of life is revealed to us, and we get more interested in how we shop for armor against doubt. And not just how we shop, how everyone does.
What’s revealed is that we don’t belong in permanent confidence. No one does. You find a seemingly reliable formula. It works for a while and then it doesn’t.
With revelation, our expectations loosen. We’re a bit more prepared for the ups and downs. We’re less anxiously busy trying to find rock-solid security. We reckon finally with the hardest news to swallow. Security comes and goes. Everyone gets a sampling of love and loss, so there’s comfort in numbers. It turns out you’re not an exception.
You still try to refill the glass, but you also know that when the glass is half full, sometimes it’s best to get a shorter glass, so what you have left is enough.
We all have to do this anyway. Aging demands it. Somehow between now and the end of our lives we each have to get to where we get by with a whole lot less in the glass.
The glass is your expectations. The third road to recovery is resigning oneself to expectation management. Management is different from always holding firm or giving up on expectations, neither of which are tenable or realistic. Your hopes will rise and fall as they should.
Sometimes you’ll hold firm to expectations; sometimes you’ll go through the chest-aching process of surrendering an expectation. This isn’t easy, because holding and letting go of expectations require opposite effort. You can’t just flip a toggle switch to go from trying with all your might to meet your standards, to not caring about your standards. To care about anything means to marshal a flotilla of yearnings toward it. To stop caring means turning that flotilla. There will be internal chaos.
This third road to recovery is restoration into your humanness. It’s inhuman to never be disappointed either by having all expectations met, or by having no expectations. It’s human to manage expectations so they match as well as you can guess what’s possible for you in this delighting and disappointing world.
Ambigamy
Insights for the deeply romantic and deeply skeptical
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