Seekers

Recreating Ourselves
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
—Soren Kierkegaard
Our culture’s obsession with heroes and magnificent deeds suggests that daring is more of an exhibit of bravado than a case of losing one’s footing. However, Kierkegaard’s assertion reminds us of who we are. We are not finished products. Our daring is not about some flamboyant display of an unusual talent. The daring that occurs during a threshold crossing is about recreating ourselves.
As Rollo May said, “Clearly self-creating is actualized by our hopes, our ideals, our images, and all sorts of imagined constructs that we may hold from time to time in the forefront of our attention.” (1994, 100) The ego takes satisfaction in believing that its current hopes, ideals, and images constitute a finished identity, not one that is in need of some new birth.
We can understand a threshold crossing as a birthing process. We may be acquiring a new belief, a new value, a new intention, or an even greater permission to feel. But as noted above, all births entail some ending. Something is dying as something is beginning. Threshold crossings call for the courage to die. And as cancer survivor Mark Nepo says, “All courage is a threshold crossing.”
The death of some expression of magical thinking often occurs at a threshold crossing. We employ magic in childhood to comfort ourselves and create an alleged feeling of security. Some of these magical beliefs include “If I work hard enough, I will be seen and appreciated,” “If I am kind to others, they will be kind to me,” “If I love enough, I can overcome any problem that comes up between me and others,” “If I give enough, I will get my needs met,” “Good things will happen if I am adaptive and not disruptive,” and “If I bring the right people into my life, I won’t be hurt.”
Of course, fate will be fraught with enough danger and hazards to shake and in some cases tear magic from our psychic grasp. This is likely one reason Nietzsche suggested that we should embrace Amor fati, or love of fate. An ancient meaning of the word fate is “ordained by the gods.” Fate has the tendency of calling us out of childhood into deeper levels of maturation and a more sustainable relationship with life.
There are two dangers we face if we do not have enough support during a threshold crossing. The first is that we may not give ourselves enough permission to grieve the loss of magical thinking employed in childhood and the losses we accrued attempting to live by magical guidance. The second danger is that some level of cynicism can easily slip into our mindset as some magical thinking dies. We may tell ourselves, “I was trying to make life something kind of neat when all along it just sucked.” We may need help to understand that just because naïveté dies, that doesn’t mean life is awful.
The seductive threshold illusion is that a death only takes place if we make a threshold crossing. A larger death occurs when we do not make a crossing. We are pilgrims! We will be moving in one direction or the other. If we are not up to recreating ourselves, then we will experience a contraction of the self.
Anita, the seventy-two-year-old founder and executive director of a shelter for homeless and unwed mothers, came in for her first appointment. She immediately began to identify the reason for her appointment.
“I have mentored many women through the years,” she reported. “I have seen what can happen for women when they are willing to heal and hold a vision of empowering themselves.” she reported. But she seemed to lack any sense of satisfaction regarding such success.
“I am familiar with your work,” I said, “and it is extremely commendable.”
“It may be commendable, but I’ve begun to wonder about my work with myself,” she said, explicitly expressing a feeling of disappointment.
“Tell me more about this work with yourself.”
“Well, I’m noticing that some of these young women have outgrown me,” she explained.
“Do you mean that they no longer need your services?”
“No, I mean they have more growth than I do,” she exclaimed, with a tone of disgust.
“How do you know that?”
“I listen to the issues they face, how they take care of themselves, and how they handle adversity,” she said.
“I’m hearing that you see something in them that you don’t see in yourself.”
“I do, and in some cases, they are twenty years younger than me,” she offered, her voice deepening.
“Have you been on pause?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning forward.
“You have lived with a commitment to mindful living and have attended to the growth supportive of such a life. So what happened?”
“Maybe I did pause and these young women just went past me,” she said.
“Do you understand how you came to decide to pause?”
“No, I don’t understand it,” she said. “But more than pausing, I see my thinking, attitudes, and self-esteem returning to an earlier time in my life.”
Our work soon revealed that Anita’s choice to pause reflected her story that if she continued making threshold crossings, she ran the risk of generating some significant distance between her and her husband. She did not trust that her husband would join her. Her threshold-crossing resistance was matching her husband’s. She was experiencing some important losses related to self-care and how she was relating to others. Anita began moving toward her next threshold crossing as I suggested she think seriously about offering emotional leadership in her marriage and that she renew her connection to her desire as a way to guide her choices.
Anita became acquainted with the great paradox of the human spirit, whose essence is change. Spirit remains on the move, either moving into creative and constructive forms or destructive and noncreative forms. As a pilgrim, it longs for an experience of the sacred, and if inhibited with enough fear, it settles for movement back toward something more primitive. The notion of pause is a euphemism for the lack of creative movement.