Double Vision
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| 9/18/2006 |
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“Things always work out.”
“I’m taken care of.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“God’s looking after me.”
For a long time, I was part of a home group that met six days a week. The same people showed up day after day, and I soon noticed that there were a certain number of people who, whenever they shared, always managed to deliver one of the above lines.
On my grouchier days, this would drive me nuts.
Recovery, it had by now been drilled into my head, was all about acceptance, and certainly these people were being accepting. But did they have to be so… cheerful about it? The people given to making these statements often spoke with an irritating sense of assurance: one that sometimes, to my ears at least, spilled over into outright smugness. Things always worked out? That was news to me. It would also, I suspected, be news to the dozen or so homeless people I’d walked by on the way to the meeting, not to mention the South African mother I’d seen on TV the night before who’d watched as all five of her children were killed in front of her. Wake up, you idiots! We’re all alone down here.
The world is a giant meat grinder, and no one’s taken care of in the least.
Not that I was alone in this sort of sentiment, of course. In fact, one could have divided up that meeting into two basic types: the things-will-work-out people, and the people like me who thought that the sky was always about to fall. (I’m simplifying, needless to say. Obviously the pessimists weren’t all doom and gloom, and the optimists weren’t all sunshine. But there was indeed a general tendency for people to fall into one camp or the other.)
It was around the time I started to notice the existence of these two camps that I happened to pick up William James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience – the book that Bill W. had steeped himself in during his final phase of pre-sobriety crack-ups. In this book, I learned that this division between the pluses and the minuses, the Chicken Littles and the Pollyannas, had a long and venerable history.
“The normal process of life,” wrote James, “contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”
Ouch. You couldn’t ask for a better expression of the Chicken Little view of things than that.
James had his own name for the Chicken Little type of person. He called him or her the Sick Soul. This type of person was, said James, constitutionally incapable of looking at the world without seeing a cauldron of horrors. James also had a name for the naturally cheery type – the person who simply tries to overlook this dark and diabolical aspect of life and see nothing but good, good, good. He called this kind of person the Healthy Minded Soul.
So which one was right?
It was, said James, a difficult question. The great difference between the Sick Soul and the Healthy Minded Soul had to do, according to him, with transformation. The Healthy Soul was not only happy with the world as it was – he was also happy with himself. Not so the Sick Soul. The Sick Soul longed for transformation: transformation of the world but also, and just as importantly, transformation of him or herself.
For that reason, James had another name for the Sick Soul: the twice-born. The sick soul needed to be born again in order to be happy.
No, not born again in an Evangelical Christian sense, necessarily. But there was something in the character of the Sick Soul, the Chicken Little personality, that gave him or her a hunger for transformative experience that the Healthy Minded Soul simply didn’t suffer from.
“In the religion of the once-born,” James wrote (that is, of the chirpy, naturally optimistic personality), “the world is a one-storied affair. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery.”
So my suspicions had been correct. There WAS something off about all those cheery, affirmative words of the natural optimists in my group. But there was also, James suggested, something false about the doom-and-gloom pessimists as well. For James, pessimism un-transformed was toxic. But pessimism transformed became – potentially at least – genuine depth; genuine healthiness.
One day at the meeting, two guys who had just started a business together spoke, one after the other.
“Things are pretty rocky with the new business right now,” the first one said. “I just hope it all works out.”
That was, of course, the kind of remark I liked. Far better, in my view, than “I know everything will be just fine.”
Then the guy’s partner spoke.
“Oh, it’ll work out all right,” he said. “It’ll work out in success or it’ll work out in bankruptcy. But it’ll work out.”
Hearing those words suddenly brought all the thinking I’d been doing about positive and negative personality types into a sharp and sudden focus. Losing a fledgling business wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could happen. But it was bad, and by his complete acceptance of the fact that it might, this guy was practicing an acceptance that went beyond simple optimism (everything’s great) and simple pessimism (everything sucks). Real acceptance meant having a kind of double vision – a double vision of a different sort than the one most of us in the meeting were used to suffering from: A vision that acknowledged that tragedy and pain were unavoidable; but that saw life as intensely meaningful – and good – all the same.
On some days, it seems patently obvious that everything happens for a reason (or that, as the philosopher Plotinus famously said, “Everything breathes together.”). On other days, it seems like nothing means anything (or as a more modern philosopher, Homer Simpson, once memorably put it, “It’s all just a bunch of stuff that happens.”).
What kind of vision is large enough to encompass both these statements?
The vision of the twice-born.
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