Sometimes when things are in flux, and chaos is especially active, it only takes a little thing to elicit an extreme response. I perceive that my road rage has been worse since Roe was overturned two weeks ago. That’s not the little thing, of course. The little thing is the idiot trying to go around me on the right to avoid waiting 6 extra seconds for a left turn ahead at the traffic intersection. This is a Denver driving tactic that is damn dangerous, and potentially fatal to any pedestrians, cyclists, skaters, or scooter riders, who are all intended to be occupying the lane into which these cars whip themselves, sometimes at full speed.
Even typing that raised my heart rate a little.
I have had some deeply mystical and revelatory experiences of energy and power moving through my body over my lifetime. I hesitate to say none have been inspired by rage, not that body shaking pulse, but I can’t recall any.
But yesterday, I was filled with a fire usually reserved for rapists, murderous police, and corporate thieves when a minivan attempted this driving whip-around move behind me. I made sure my car blocked him, and I felt like Gandalf barring passage to the Balrog. When I am NOT experiencing an extreme response, I laugh at bad driving behavior, and maybe rant a bit about traffic safety and transportation theory and the radical disconnects in Denver right now.
There was no child in danger, no flock of geese or gaggle of cyclists to protect. This was not at all a rational or useful thing on my part. It felt like an immense waste of a large amount of power, even physically and not just metaphorically.
I have been involved in systems and hierarchies that hold someone, put them on pause within that system, when a significant life event happens. This event could be something like going into recovery or experiencing the death of a spouse, and the intent is that no one can compartmentalize well enough to truly function through that level of personal change.
Grace is always good. Creating space for a pause is a healthy thing for a system to do. I believe more dissertations would be completed, for example, if the time constraints were removed. More art would be made if basic living needs were met first -it’s not about paint or clay. Counter-intuitive perhaps but nonetheless true.
The other side of this that lives constantly in my head is that we sure as hell better learn how to function holistically, in an integrative way, no matter what chaos reigns around us. We can’t always pause, we can’t always find the space we need. We don’t have time or energy to expend any on the distractions, or to let them unbalance us. In fact, we also must accept our own grief and lament, rage and despair, as normative responses to traumatic experience.
I know this is true for me personally, and the next thing I did after the aforementioned driving incident was get lunch, because no one -certainly not I- functions well with low blood sugar. Historically, I forget to eat, or lose my tolerance for food, on a regular basis. Developing different disciplines for myself around food has been an important task, and while I sometimes let it slide a bit, I no longer push it at all past that awareness, and have gotten much better at that.
Back when I was doing youth ministry on a regular basis, I got quite skilled at my poker face. Almost nothing outwardly phased me, but I still let much of it get to me internally. I began to understand that a community of adults who worked with children and youth could help each other manage and process that necessary dissonance, to facilitate how it all moved through us as people.
Those communities of colleagues and friends helped me both hold the bland smile and nod in front of the teenager saying jaw dropping things and hold that tension more gently within myself. After I left youth ministry, I slowly lost that poker face tendency as a default, and started learning to re-weave my expressions into my life. I’ve gone overboard with it at times, and have had to re-learn how to school my face. But what I no longer worry about is that dissonance, that disconnect or automatic compartmentalization, being an obstacle or barrier in any way.
One of my basic guiding lights is that none of us is meant to go through this alone, and that is certainly true. It’s not only true, but essential. A source of so much of our frustration and our anger is the feeling of helplessness, the sense that we can rail and rage against a broken system or a violent world or even be doing many proactive things to heal the earth, but that it just really doesn’t matter.
When we break down those walls that separate us into our own little powerhouses that are ‘supposed’ to be able to bear all things, learn all lessons, and manage every crisis, and instead see that we are part of many greater wholes, we grow. We grow in the ability to manage panic, urgency, and rage. We grow in courage and compassion. We grow in understanding and insight. We grow in skills and assets.
For we have all we need to build the world we require.
May it be so.