An Emergent Strength

I’ve noticed something. A capacity that is important. I completely missed it a couple of years ago, when I was writing The Evolving Elder. Now I think I was hasty, or not yet mature enough, to grasp what strength it takes, and that is available to some, to open up, and meet the world as it is. Because I can experience it now, perhaps I have grown. I want to reflect upon the way vulnerability becomes a strength. Of all the unlikely developments that occur, it seems the most unlikely would be the emergence of strength from a sense of weakness.

Mind you, I don’t think that this particular strength, the ability to meet reality in a vulnerable way, is restricted to elders. I do believe it emerges in response to life experience, but I don’t assume that the rare combination of hardship and the sensibility it engenders comes only to the old. Life is profuse and diverse enough, that anyone can be cast into a situation that grows this attribute. Since, I do think it is a product of life experience, I suspect it is more likely to occur to those who have been around the block most. But, I know Life is capable of generating it anywhere.

Why is this important? Well, first of all, to counteract the assumption that vulnerability is a sign of weakness. Then, more importantly, so vulnerability can take its place in the pantheon of Life’s gifts to we humans. In this case, I’ve come to see vulnerability as an essential quality of emotional, maybe even spiritual, maturity.

The ability to walk into threatening places is not fearlessness — it is rather the capacity to bear pain, fear, and anxiety for the sake of growth. That which grows one, is fraught with these difficulties. Maturity comes with a cost. Initiation always contains its ordeals. If there isn’t enough pain and death anxiety around then only pseudo-initiation occurs. The process might feel good, the words around it may seem on-target, but nothing of genuine spiritual and emotional significance is really occurring. If one doesn’t experience the vulnerability of potentially perishing then one can know that the risk factor is not high enough to generate genuine results.

When I think of how Life has grown this capacity in me, all I have to do is think about the apprehension that rose in me the first time I held, and looked at, my daughter. Then, I knew my heart was overcome with love for what could die.  I felt elation, love, hope, and a painful sense that Life was changing my orientation forever. As a first-time parent, I was thrust into a more exposed, and complex world.

The vulnerability I felt then was very different than the vulnerability that I experienced earlier in my life. Like everyone else I had very human parents, imperfect and sometimes insensitive. I have experienced the vulnerability of being exposed, of being unseen or unheard. All of these conditions cause pain, they leave debilitating holes, and they rain havoc upon relationships. They create a kind of susceptibility, a cliffhanging feeling of immanent peril.

I call it the vulnerability of being small. It takes another kind of vulnerability to be big.

Lately, I’ve come to see the enlarging power of grief. Connecting with the larger process of Life is an audacious thing. It means accepting so much. The pain and vulnerability of existence rushes in, and Life vibrates with uncertainty. A kind of radiant fragility, a fiery susceptibility emanates from the core of it all. What exists, in an explosion of energy, passes from existence. What is, is lost, to make possible what follows. The gains of new life are intimately linked to the losses that make them possible. This is a kind of magnificent vulnerability that is an innate strength. It is in us, a power of the Universe, coursing through our lives, just waiting for the recognition that comes to those who dare be big.

Grief and praise are linked in some cosmologies. For good reason. The vulnerability that is a strength, is derived from an experiential realization of this paradoxical relationship. The hardships of Life sensitize one. They bring home the deepest purpose of suffering — what one losses carves out a gain. Stepping toward this kind of awareness is a courageous act that takes strength, not the kind infused with certainty, but the kind that aches with the uncertainty. Vulnerability is the price of playing in the big league.

Maturity, as I have gotten older, isn’t what it used to be. Vulnerability is an ability, one that amazes me, and infuses me with pleasure.