Terror

On Sand Cats, Suffering, and the Self

I’ve been noticing this terror that rises in my chest. It shows up in different flavors, each one equally capable of stopping me in my tracks.

The first terror is about writing and teaching. God forbid I don’t say the thing that needs saying—the words that turn the tide, hit the nail on the head, deliver the healing I know is possible. But then there’s the flip side: the terror of actually doing it and sounding like some crazy idealistic person everyone writes off. What if I really say what I want to say and it’s misunderstood, misconstrued, or worse—ignored? This usually freezes me completely and makes me procrastinate. And then the first terror kicks back in because I’m not actually getting it out of me. It’s a fun little cycle.

Then there’s an entirely different terror, the kind that hit me yesterday: I can’t find the tiny slip of paper my son is attached to. He wants me to bring it to his grandma’s house tonight for pumpkin carving. It’s the image of a sand cat on a National Geographic card we ripped out of the back of a magazine. For some reason he’s really attached to it, and I don’t know where it is.

The terror of disappointing him, of letting him down, of bringing about grief in his little being—it’s clearly blown out of proportion, but in the moment it feels devastatingly real. He’s going to feel like the world is a cruel place. Like his mom doesn’t care about him and fails when she’s most needed. Part of me knows this is a good lesson because the world is kind of unfair and sometimes cruel, so maybe it’s good that he learns this now. But the other part of me—the part that feels the raw nerve of that terror—hates that there are constant tragedies and disappointments in this life. I feel a primal urge to protect my beloved son from that despair.

Really though? I’m doing some major projecting onto him, because it is I who feel the despair. Especially with my Enneagram Seven nature (the type that sees infinite beautiful possibilities in everything), when potential isn’t realized—even in the minute example of my son not getting his beloved cat card—I feel devastated.

I know I sound nuts. I know I’m drowning in first-world problems. But here’s the thing: this is the stuff we’re all daily struggling with in our own ways. Suffering. Dukkha, as the Buddhists call it. Things don’t turn out the way we want them to. Things happen in ways we dislike. We want life to give us joy, bliss, ease, flow, and comfort. We cringe away from life when it gives us pain, sorrow, unfairness, and discomfort. We crave some states of experience and avert our hearts and energy away from others. We cling to pleasant sensations and reject unpleasant ones.

We are not going to get free of this cycle of craving and aversion any time soon, if ever. Maybe that’s not even the goal. Because if we keep that as the goal, we’re just caught in the same cycle—craving to be free of craving and aversion!

So what’s the aikido-like move? The jump into hyperspace? The best idea I’ve had is to learn to see the bigger picture and realize that the “me” I’ve been so convinced I am is not really who “I” am. What if I can witness the craving and aversion happening in my human body and mind without being compulsively compelled to act on them? What if I begin to operate from a vaster field that is not tied up in the craving and aversion—a field that contains these tendencies just as a vast sky contains a few scattered clouds, but which cannot be defined by them?

And what does this all have to do with a National Geographic card of a sand cat and the experience I call “terror” in my body?

On a basic level, it doesn’t matter so much why I feel the terrors I feel. The reasons are aplenty and they’re going to be unique to each of us. What seems to matter much more is how we relate to and hold our experience of suffering. When I can sense into the larger view—that vastness that is much more the real me than the temporary form-body-identity I generally think is “me”—then I can hold that human experience I’m having in a non-reactive, compassionate embrace.

This vaster presence version of who I am does not (cannot) fix the problem of my pain. But through its very presence, the pain slowly releases and wholeness is restored, at least for the moment. And we can only really work with this moment anyway.

Even when I can’t find the sand cat card.