Pursued to distraction

The author William Faulkner, in his 1950 Nobel banquet speech, spoke of his belief that we would not merely endure, that we would prevail. I’ve always thought this to be a critical distinction.

Prevailing, finding meaning in a moment, is the spirit of existing. Life needs to be more than solely the foundation for the passage of time. Much of life requires the mastery of endurance, but enduring only is meaningless.

It can feel, at times, that a lot of life becomes just simply enduring. You need to be careful, consciously aware of the lure of dulling repetition, to prevail.

There’s a danger that the idea of prevailing, as you grow older, can increasingly seem unlikely. Can seem unnecessary or even pointless to pursue. And that’s not right. That’s not how we are constructed.

We are not born to concede to simply watching the days pass by. No child is only enduring, every child seeks to prevail, to move as more into the next adventure. That’s not conscious, it’s not considered or discussed, it’s just the extension of being alive without restriction.

Then come the distractions, the created moments designed to occupy time for the benefit of others. A taming of spirit made necessary by the demands of nurturing a human being. Demands on the teacher becoming demands on the student.

Balancing the understanding of the endurance required to survive with the wild joy of becoming more is critical for growth. Manufacturing distractions is not.

More and more, distractions are being purposefully bred to be just distractions. They’re not being created for any other purpose. They’re just being created to consume your time, to contain your existence.

And that’s a concern. A concern that we are being encouraged to think that things are changing because the screen is changing, that the reframed movie is new, and a tool is something else because it has a new shape.

Meant to believe that the pages being swiped, flipped or regenerated, somehow represent change, but they rarely do.

Most of the time these are illusions, a grift meant to separate us from reality. It’s a concern for anybody who’s interested in maximizing their existence. It’s the embodiment of just enduring. The encouraging of distractions that have no benefit for the distracted. Trained to endure without learning to prevail.

And that’s not to say that there aren’t benefits to distractions, because of course there are. You need to be distracted at times. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need. But it shouldn’t be a job. It shouldn’t be an overriding pursuit. It should be a respite, a rest, not a destination.

You prevail not by laying down, you prevail as you keep moving forward, making each day something more than it would have been without you.

Because no matter what your circumstances, every day becomes more because of you, if that’s the decision you make, if you make the decision to approach it as more.

If you make the decision to approach it as something that you need to endure, then that’s what it will be.

Maybe the concept of prevailing has the suggestion of a slog, an uphill struggle, as something Sisyphean, which it can certainly feel like at times. Endlessly pushing the boulder up the hill, returning each day to the hill to begin again. Our boulder now become our pursuit of distraction.

Maybe. And maybe we prevail by remembering the wild joy of a child running from there to here. For the most satisfying and meaningful reason of all: because here is not there.

Because it’s possible to make any moment more by wanting it to be more, by not being dulled by distraction when there is so much more to live.

Act I, Scene I — Lizard Brain

Survival

Sometimes you need to run.

We learn we survive

We were old enough, she and I, to have the dexterity and power to tip the box over. We found we could move the house where the flickering images we didn’t understand lived. I suppose it seemed like the thing to do.

How we managed this is forever to be a mystery, as there were no witnesses.

I can imagine that the sound that brought our mother hurtling down the stairs past me, as I went hurtling up in the other direction, was as frightening to her as the realization that we were still alive was relieving.

I ran up the stairs past my mother, explaining, “it felled on its own self.” I’d like to say that I checked on my first friend, and I certainly hope I did. More likely, if I did pause, it was only long enough to make sure that something even more horrifying hadn’t occurred.

Until this moment I had no idea I was alive.

Protecting awareness

There was no awareness of survival, no understanding that survival isn’t guaranteed, No recognition that the future is not infinite. Then suddenly you know: things can go wrong.

It’s on some kind of primitive level where you make the connection that you were threatened. Profoundly you know that your being was in peril, and there’s no way you’re putting any of that into words, this beginning of the realization that it can end.

Though there may be no memory of taking that first flight to survive, in that moment, there is the reckoning that survival is not guaranteed. The nascent understanding that there is a fine line between being and not being, and it could be crossed in an instant.

There has to be an inherent mechanism for survival. Something that just pushes you to continue, to keep going. We’re programmed to breathe right from the first moment that the fluid is knocked out of our lungs, we’re programmed to breathe and to keep breathing. It’s contrary to the mechanism to not want to.

Only in the most extreme conditions do we turn from the imperative to survive, but why do we need to survive beyond the obvious? Is it our primary function to survive only? Or to risk not surviving, to be more?

It’s not just a gentle matter of continuing. It’s some kind of primitive dictate, we must continue. In the beginning there is no other consideration, the reflex to survive is an absolute.

As we get older, that decision, a value judgement about life, that consideration can be made, but it’s made from the background of accumulated experience. It’s made from weariness with the condition that we find ourselves in.

But before the gathering of higher understandings around the lizard brain, there’s none of that. It’s simply the prime directive, to survive.

We vaguely recall formative incidents, if at all. We don’t know if we truly remember them, or if the repeating of the story has given us the recall. But it serves either way as a storage point for memory, a way of touching, referencing, the lessons learned. A function of the necessity to survive, the recall of setbacks.

It’s a big change, this awareness, this new player in the game, this sense of the possibility of peril coming from the outside. Peril that needs to be considered and planned for. The power of the knowledge that a moment can have less than agreeable outcomes.

It’s easy to imagine the influence of this introduction to danger. Now it’s real, this life is real. We’ve learned a lesson. We need to be vigilant, we need to consider our surroundings and our interactions because they can go sideways.

That moment would also be deeply wounding, because it would come from your place of perceived safety and security. That place now threatened.

You’d been born, you’d gone through that. You were starting to settle into the concept of being provided for, being safe, being nurtured. And that is taken away, replaced by the beginnings of the awareness of the will to survive.

From beyond awareness there came awareness. Now there is keeping that awareness safe.

A change you carry forever.