Background:

Recently I participated in a group discussion in which we were each reporting on our progress in implementing a new program on The Spiritual Dimensions of Aging.  The facilitators opened the meeting by reading the following short essay, followed by a question we were each asked to respond to.  I found the process helped me unleash some of the anxieties and fears I was harboring about the ongoing assaults on our democracy, rule of law, and on those who are simply caring out their responsibilities.  I decided to share the following reading with a broader audience.

Meeting Your Edge

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Lovingkindness

There is a story about a group of people climbing to the top of a mountain. It turns out it’s pretty steep, and as soon as they get up to a certain height, a couple of people look down and see how far it is, and they completely freeze; they had come up against their edge and they couldn’t go beyond it. 

The fear was so great that they couldn’t move. Other people tripped on ahead, laughing and talking, but as the climb got steeper and scarier, more people began to get scared and freeze. All the way up this mountain there were places where people met their edge and just froze and couldn’t go any farther.  The people who made it to the top looked out and were happy to have made it to the top.

The moral of the story is that it really doesn’t make any difference where you meet your edge; just meeting it is the point.  Life is a whole journey of meeting your edge again and again.  That’s where you are challenged; that’s where, if you’re a person who wants to live, you start to ask yourself questions like, “Now, why am I so scared?  What is it that I don’t want to see?  Why can’t I go any further than this?”

The people who got to the top were not the heroes of the day.  It’s just that they weren’t afraid of heights; they are going to meet their edge somewhere else. The ones who froze at the bottom were not the losers. They simply stopped first and so their lesson came earlier than the others.  However, sooner or later everybody meets his or her edge.

What is an edge in your life right now where you are afraid?

Each of  us participating in the discussion were asked to reveal what edge we were struggling with currently.  It turned out to be a quite helpful question for me, as it forced me to get in touch with the anxiety I was experiencing.  With all that we have been experiencing via Covid issues and the ongoing, increasing nastiness and divisiveness being promoted by a former president, I feel like I’ve been living with daily anxiety over the last several years.

Many of us are conditioned to just keep pressing on, persevering through it all.  There are many advantages to this conditioning for it we came to a halt over every daily annoyance in our lives, we would accomplish very little.

On the other hand, there are different levels of anxiety, and I can usually tell when I’ve entered higher states of anxiousness.  I was aware that I was experiencing a more advanced state of anxiety over the last few days, but I wasn’t able to pin down what precipitated it until I sat with this bolded question.

In a short amount of time, my reflections led me to a helpful insight:  What is making me anxious is an awareness that the edge keeps moving.  The edge I’m referring to is that the former president continues to create chaos.  In my lifetime I’ve never experienced a former president’s actions being a daily news event.

I have learned to ignore most of the reporting on his behaviors as the legal system seems to be the assigned arbiter of his claims.  But when his actions incite violence and incentivize people to harm institutions and people he has deemed the enemy, I find it very disturbing.

My point in sharing this example isn’t to persuade readers to my way of processing current events.  Instead, it is to illustrate how it can be effective to tune into our higher states of anxiety in order to gain a better understanding of the causes.

Once I realized what was troubling me, the insights gained felt like they let some of the air out of the inflated space holding me hostage.  I have begun searching for additional resources — trusted friends, publications, meditating. 

I also enjoyed the message in this short reading that reminds us that we all have edges that we struggle with in some part of our lives.  We may not be as physically able as some of our friends, but we might be more able than others to listen to people share difficult periods in their lives.

Wishing you all well in exploring the edges that you may be encountering in your lives currently.