“Fooled You!”
I have a friend who has a health problem right now, and he refuses to see a doctor about it. Reason? “I’m afraid it might be something big.” This isn’t the first time someone has told me they prefer to remain in the dark. I, too, have done this – not with my health, but with my house. Sometime back I noticed a plumbing problem and delayed calling the plumber for the exact same reason – what if it’s something really big? Behaviors like this always intrigue me; beneath their “reason”, is always a question. In this case: What’s the aversion to knowing?
All around the excitement leading up to 12-21-2012 the online world was slinging questions and answers about as to why humans find it so compelling to imagine outright and total disaster such as the world’s end. Apocalypse, it seems, entertains us in some way, or else serves a purpose. I have some ideas on what that purpose is, and it has the same root as delaying a trip to the doctor or calling a plumber.
The world is a mess. That’s definitely one way to look at it. From that perspective – wars, famines, pollution, human rights violations – it seems waaaay too big to start to fix. From that perspective it’s hard to imagine where to start. From that perspective, it’s hard to imagine that any act we could do as an individual – outside of waging a dramatic, national-media covered hunger strike, which most of us don’t have time for this week – could even make a dent.
From that perspective, the reset button starts to look really interesting…
I am drawn to the last time my computer had a virus. I located the program, the program it was infecting, Googled the steps to remove it, followed them exactly, and it was gone. For ten minutes. Then it popped up again because it had “hidden” files. I had seen that warning, but then I was fresh into the project and poo-pooed it: “I’ll find it, how hard can it be?” By hour five my inner argument had turned to “Just throw this whole, stupid thing away. They’re really cheap at Best Buy right now.” Reset button.
And here lies the root, at least from my perspective, of why we deliciously horrify ourselves with talk of the Mayan end of humanity, don’t go to the doctor, and live with a strange noise in the rinse cycle: It’s not the cause we fear, it’s the fear that once we know, we’ll have to fix it. Fixing it means having to do some work. Fixing it, means changing. And change can be really scary.
Once, when my teacher was staying with me, she asked me at breakfast what I had dreamed the night before. I told her, and she suggested a waking dream to address the necessity of the dream (to make the shift the dream was asking me to make). I said “sure, I’ll do it”, and then returned to making breakfast. I realized in the vacuum of silence I had miss-stepped. “You mean, right now?” Her answer was simple: “Why wait?”
Why wait is a powerful lesson. Why drag out our pain and suffering? Why wait to find out answers?
By the time I finally made myself call the plumber I had turned an $80 no-biggie into an $800 BIGGIE. Waiting escalates a problem. So my friend might have to cut out butter and go to the gym – it’s much less work than not doing so, guaranteed. And so I might have to fork over $80 – way better than $800 I can attest. Facing up to the fact that we don’t have a reset button, but we DO have the tools to fix things, is a step onto the road of transformation. It’s to stop waiting and to start. And so it is with the world.
Yeah, the world is a mess, but a powerful step can be taken just by looking at our own inner lives: Where, inside me, am I not in harmony with someone? What is this ongoing agitation with my neighbor over their yapping dog – isn’t it time to put my hand across the fence and shake on it? After all, I’m sure my yelling “Go get your stick!!” to mine five hundred times over every afternoon in our abutting backyards is equally annoying. Where can we step across the lines we’ve drawn to bring peace in our inner world, our home, our neighborhood? Because solving wars halfway around the globe is fine … but can we really do that if we hate our next-door neighbor? If we wait, it will only be fodder for escalation.
And there is no reset button.
