Freefalling, anchoring, be your own charlatan

Freefalling

Sometimes I reach through states of frustration and sheer helplessness where advancing through today doesn't feel sustainable. Having visibility into the next days or weeks ahead doesn't feel sustainable either, because months or even years back, when I query them, they seem to have passed without a change, without a sign of improvement on where I wish I was today.

I've been here many times in life, and I recall it as a chain of long episodes of painful struggle. I've been dealing with closed doors since forever, starting as a kid trying to fit in, finding a way from a poor stranger in a village in a small socialist country to making it all work in the US.

It is very hard when you find yourself honestly helpless. As in, you question why you are here, since as far as you can see, forward and backwards, you're doubting your purpose, your actual existence. People around you start to fade. Your friends, your network, your hobbies, the objects you own, the actual beautiful nature surrounding you, are all a numb input that is sort of meaningless. You're being served all kinds of food, yet you are unable to use it.

When feelings take over and they are the bad kind, when the overall assessment is that you're freefalling and everything is a blur around you, my immediate emergency handle is logic, and belief.

Anchoring

I use my own logic and believing power to scaffold my way into a safety zone, for lack of a better comparison, similar to a climber falling off a cliff.

The first thing I always train myself for is to improve my resilience, my ability to stay lucid, energized, composed, for whatever I may need to do forward. If I don't get a checkmark on a basic self-test of my overall composure, I don't move forward, and sometimes this can take days to refine until I am in the right zone for where I need to be next.

This is what I call anchoring. I start to look deep into facts of my past life and bring them up in as vivid memory as I possibly can, and give them the shine they once used to have, from the times when I was convinced life treated me as special. We all have such moments when we search for them carefully.

One comes to my mind from about seven years ago. We were invited with my wife and our four year old twins to a lavish party at someone's house. Lots of people talking, background music, waiters, all outdoors, a large pool though not a pool party exactly. I always keep a very close eye on my kids at such events, and as I was talking with a small group, having one of those social know-each-other dialogs, I see both my kids walking on the far edge of the pool, and my clumsy son decides to walk past my daughter and accidentally pushes her in. They don't know how to swim. They don't know much of anything useful at this age. My son keeps running toward whatever shiny object he saw next, while my daughter is disappearing under the water. It took me a couple of seconds to look at one of the people in front of me, no one else seemed to notice what was happening, and I tell him "hold this now please," I hand him my glass and my phone, and I run to the pool, plunge, and come out with my daughter on the other side. She's a bit shaken, took some gulps of water, but nothing wrong at all, crying a bit but forgetting what even happened in seconds. Meanwhile the entire party is switching gears as people start to realize what happened, and there I was, soaking wet in business casual clothes and shoes. My wife surfaces, people ask all sorts of things, the expected frenzy combined with everyone being relieved, and I drive back to change and rejoin.

You can't assume your life is worthless when you can search through your past and identify memories like these. You need to anchor yourself into them, no matter how fast and scary the freefall is. If you were given the choice to be given a life just for one or two such moments, you would probably have agreed it was worth it. So you repolish, recherish such memories, and you start to understand the humbling reality of how much more powerful this universe is than your direct momentary freefalling, or wherever you are with your struggles. I know you have your own moments, when you seek deep enough.

Anchoring usually works. A few moments well recreated from our past can do magic when passed through our logic and belief.

But sometimes we can't put those to work either. Sometimes the seriousness of the freefall, the speed, the blur, the exhaustion, the lack of appetite and hope, are selfishly strong, and we refuse, or we are unable to give enough credit to our own existence to date, to the miracle of being alive, wherever we are, as painful as it may be.

Be your own charlatan

This is where I reach into magic. Feel free to call it faith, universe, supernatural. I literally turn away from everything logical and look straight into the abyss of the universe, and try hard to ask for clues, whatever they may be. I give it time. It can take days, or weeks. But I give time for some sort of sign, what some may call a micro miracle, that proves to me that I am a guided person in this world, that something above me has given me a mission, a purpose, has not forgotten about me.

I begin this like opening a spiritual communication channel. Just like anchoring involves a clear minded deep recollection of moments, the connection with the universe is also typically very much lost, since on a day to day basis we don't quite think of it, just like stopping to exercise gets you out of shape over time. I try to look into myself as hard as I can and little by little reprogram myself to be ready to believe in magic, while being appreciative for even the slightest sign I may receive.

A couple of years ago I was so down with everything going on, it seemed like nothing was working, not a single door was opening, and that particular day was more ridiculous than any other, even Murphy's laws seemed to be creeping in. I decided to get into my car and drive to the beach and just sit on a bench, in the rain, and think, or clear my mind, looking for one single thing, one single sign, no matter what, to be shown to me by the universe that something is special, that something is more than where I feel to be. As I walk back to my car, the only one in this large parking lot, right at my driver's door side, on the ground, I see a card. A Jack of Spades. That was all I was hoping for, a sign, and to me that answered it. I took the card and still have it, wrinkled as it was, in my wallet.

This is where one could clearly observe it is a meaningless random event of life, and if we had a camera we would most likely have seen a silly chain of events that resulted in that card being there.
When I was 18, applying to colleges in the US and getting rejections left and right, completely crushing my hopes, I was walking one afternoon through a city and decided to enter a random church. I sat down on a bench, in quiet, cleared my mind, and as genuinely as I could I asked for a sign of what to do next. I went back home and a small letter was waiting for me with the one and only approval I received.

Another time I was flying somewhere, desperately seeking a sign, and as a border patrol agent is looking at my passport, he pauses and looks at me. I am a bit nervous, as we all tend to be, you never know what's next. He says "young man, you're gonna be just fine, welcome back." I'm pretty sure this sort of communication is not typical part of that job description. I could have asked what he meant, and it may have ruined my image of a sign, but why would I. That's not what I asked for earlier.

This is where I find the power to believe in it in a charlatanesque way, as if it was the sign I was looking for. After all, if we had to receive something from a superpower, as small as we are, it is not like the seas will open and a creature will come to pat us on our shoulder. It's more about us opening our eyes to spot the tiny messages that might be embedded around us.

I have quite a few such moments in life, and usually they happened when I was at crossroads, when I had a desperate need for help, or when I took life changing decisions, and in each case there was just one clear route to take. I would have never taken the other routes based on the circumstances at the time. I know you have them too, and you might just need to clear your mind and get into that zone of seeking them.

That's as far as I have ever had to go to regain my momentum, to realign myself with the rails of life, to come back to a more powerful self than before and be able to look around me and breathe the air, feed myself with the signals and the beauty that surrounds me, and navigate into the next episode.