no way out of risk

RISK
What comes to your mind when you first hear that word? Risk. Some people associate it with “danger” most of the time, and most people some of the time. Risk is to the manic-depressive as hair-trigger is to gun. “Be careful! Watch out! This might be too much and could set you off.” Risk is, well, risky. The old adage what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger (or something like that) is somewhat ironic in the context of manic-depression. Those of us with manic-depression do have to be particularly vigilant, discerning, and diligent with regards to how we invest our energies and how we put ourselves out there. We have to ask ourselves, “How much is too much? If I push myself in this area will I trigger myself?” We have the proverbial manic episode that can cleverly masquerade as an optimistic adventure void of danger. The illness, though firmly grounded in unpredictability due to arbitrary fluctuations in our body or brain chemistry, is none-the-less easily influenced by circumstances. It regularly upsets me that normal risk taking behavior can catapult me into mania or depression depending on the outcome. Sometimes I find I have to question myself all the time. It is tedious. Sometimes I think it is unfair.

In the same way the insulin dependent diabetic must be ever vigilant about what they consume and their physical activity, the manic-depressive lifestyle is managed, monitored, and sometimes curtailed. I always think of Nicole Kidman’s well deserved academy award winning portrayal of Virginia Woolf in the movie The Hours. Virginia Woolf herself suffered from manic-depression. In fact she died by suicide, a statistically significant form of death for manic-depressives. It is so heartbreaking to think of the pain she must have been experiencing when she drowned herself in a small river off their property.

In the movie, The Hours, Virginia’s husband has moved her and their printing business out to the country to get her away from the provocative intensity of the London scene that frequently triggered her episodes. The scene from The Hours, included below, takes place after her sister and nieces left abruptly after an all too short visit with Woolf. Virginia, upset and agitated, runs off to the train station. Her husband panics when he discovers she has disappeared and he runs to the station where he finds her. The dialog is right on, and one of the most accurate portrayals of what living with manic-depression looks like and feels like. I wholly identify with the passion and pain with which she tries to convey how she alone has to live with the uncertainties, how she wants to live despite the cruelty of her illness.

Go ahead and watch the clip below.

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.” Woolf ultimately did die at their country home and not in London. It seems that it didn’t matter where she was, the disease was there with her. It reminds me of a saying my friend Cheryl and I pass back and forth to one another, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I can't avoid myself with this illness. I am a force to contend with. To help me see myself when I don’t, I have people. People who love me. People who love me despite the many reasons they should run the other direction. These people say things to me like Leonard says to Virginia. They tell me what I need to know for my own good because they care. They know, or are scared, that I can easily get myself in over my head and pay a high price. Me getting myself in over my head is like buying a house when you are bankrupt. By the time I'm over my head it is already too late.

In fact, I have to depend on people to help me remember. Help me see what I’m headed toward if I proceed in a manner that is blatantly unaware and less than discriminatory. They say things like, “Isn’t that a trigger for you?” which, in my ears, sounds like “Hey, stop living would you. It's bad for your health.” I, like Virginia, want to live and our standard has been significantly informed by the manic years. Normal life pales, restricts, and sometimes feels like death. People’s cautionary tones sound like a death sentence sometimes. I hear, “You can’t do it”, and “I would rather you live a life of death so I don’t have to be scared what’s going to happen to you if you do this thing.” Don’t hear me wrong. I want them to love me this way. It’s just really heartbreaking and frustrating sometimes. It's hard to know where the line is.

I’m like a moth to the flame when it comes to doing things that could potentially “trigger” my illness. I ask myself this all the time, “Is my passion reflective of common human passion or is it manic passion?” It is tiresome. Sometimes it really isn’t a clear delineation just as Kidman’s Woolf tries painfully to explain to her husband.

Aimee Mann wrote a great song The Moth which speaks to the passion with which any of us wrestle with the passion and fear. When we are faced with uncertainties made complex by passion and desire. Is something we want the best thing for our growth or is it to our detriment? Though we are not left to our own devices to determine our actions –because, God seems always willing to offer his opinion if we ask for it– we all know it really isn’t idealistically simple. We obviously were equipped with free will and responsibility for our own lives.

So we find ourselves immersed in a battle involving passion, desire, and fear (or avoidance). People “fight” these battles differently. Some people live on the mean side of avoidance. In lieu of living and creating, they often chose not to create at all. Creativity is more than artistic, but real life is fully creative. These folks are not usually that fun to be around. Others cause us to feel like the parent of a baby learning to walk. We sit on the edge of our seat anxiously waiting to catch them when they climb their way to their feet, arms flailing about, narrowly avoiding the sharp edges of furniture and drowsy unsuspecting kitty cats. It is uncomfortable to watch someone else go out on the veritable limb. In the end we are all responsible for our own soil.

Here are the partial lyrics to The Moth.

The moth don't care when he sees the flame
he might get burned but he's in the game
and once he's in he can't go back, and
beat his wings 'til he burns them black
no the moth don't care when he sees the flame
no the moth don't care when he sees the flame
the moth don't care if the flame is real
cuz flame and moth got a sweetheart deal
and nothing fuels a good flirtation
like need and anger and desperation
no the moth don't care if the flame is real
no the moth don't care if the flame is real
So come on let's go ready or not
cuz there's a flame I know hotter than hot
and with a fuse that's so thoroughly shotaway

Can’t we all relate to that moth? I have to offer my opinion here (even though you didn’t ask) that anyone who doesn’t see him or her self as the moth is clearly one of two things: boring or deluded. Fortunately, none of my friends fall into the former category. We fall into that category, I think, when we believe that the flame is bad. “No good can come of that flame. Steer clear of it! You’ll burn yourself!”

Yet where would we be without that flame? The flame being inspiration! Desire, passion, curiosity, and ambition are all provoked and fueled by the flame? What about the bazillion things that have been accomplished throughout human history because of the lure of the flame and the desire to risk everything even in the face of an uncertain outcome? Remember, inherent to risk is uncertainty. We don’t get to know the end of the story without going all the way through the uncertainties step by unpredictable step. In order to say you rode the scariest roller coaster ride(isn’t the word “coaster” is misnomer?) you have to actually pay for and then ride the thing. Then puke.

The inventors, the movers of society, the lovers, the poets, the inspirations and muses to our own lives are indeed people who look into the flame and get captured. They “get” captured and then allow themselves, often disregarding other people’s advice and cautionary tones, to follow their passion. Don’t you think? I think so.

Love is risk. And with regards to romantic endeavors, especially in the beginning. Additionally, risk should always be embodied by love. The outcome is uncertain and, actually, inconsequential. It is hardly easy to live out love in our actions and words. Love is risky because we never know what price we will pay for giving it.

I hate living in uncertainty. But I have to. It’s like the drowning man out in the ocean. Sink or swim baby! Uncertainty is all around you and there's no denying it.

Why do we resist/fear uncertainty? We even work concertedly and ineffectually to eradicate it from our lives. Why do we so often view risk only in the context of “dangerous”? How come we cannot clearly delineate the ultimate nature of the endeavors we face? We never really know if it is going to ultimately be beneficial or dangerous. I don’t care how much you pray, God rarely spares us mystery by making things crystal clear. The Bible, other people, prayer, all of these things do not explain why God seems not to tell us anything any sooner than we need to hear it. Which is usually right at each footfall. Most often we have to take the first step with very little information...and even that information requires great faith to move on.

Perhaps, risk is both beneficial AND dangerous. BOTH is GOOD news! Mostly we don’t feel that giddy about it. It isn't always good news. We like our cake, we want to eat it, and we don’t want it to show up on our hips. However, we don’t know the benefit and danger until we really live (which is like eating our cake piece by piece so the calories get spread out over time).
We don’t know until we follow through the unknown.
We don’t know until we try.
We don’t know until we’ve failed.
We don’t quit before we’ve even tried.
We don’t know because risk is fundamentally unclear and mysterious.

Who doesn’t like the idea of risking if the benefits are all spelled out and secured? But who’s ever experienced that? That’s what movies, books, and t.v. are for –i.e. stories of unpredictable steps of uncertainty (if it is good writing) condensed into a concise story with a clear beginning and end. As I’ve explained before, that just isn’t life. That’s art.

Speaking of art (and don’t hear me saying that t.v. is art), I think it takes a lot of guts and tremendous risk is involved in living an authentic life. Good art is always authentic. Another way to look at authenticity is to think of Jesus. If you are Christian we might say an authentic life “looks like Jesus”. Following the footsteps of Jesus is less fundamental or predictable, and more uncommon. That kind of life is lived entirely out of passionate love. Radical but not fundamental. It is a life of authenticity that provokes.

Love is risky. It certainly is not easy. Come on, you know it’s true. I can give you a second to think of the multitude of ways you have failed to love those around you. How in the world can we love well without being authentic? In other words, how can inauthenticity be at all loving? To yourself, to God, or to others? And let me tell you again, authenticity is hard. You HAVE to know that! It’s no cakewalk and it’s no common life that endeavors and desires a common life.

People who really live, who allow themselves to follow through on their desires and passions (i.e. risk) are like watersheds for future generations.

What do you think Sir Edmund Hillary said when he first set his eyes on Chomolungma (Mt. Everest)? I always assume that, after exclaiming “That is one big ________ mountain”, he crooned with the far off look of a man in love, “I’m in trouble now”. Trouble for sure.

Have you ever experienced this kind of "trouble"? “I’m in trouble.” Risk’s middle name is Trouble. Why? This kind of trouble excites and incites the best in a person while posing the most danger to his life. The twofold signatures or the fuel of this kind of trouble are desire and passion. That’s what makes risk so uncertain. It is born out of passion and desire. These two words have so much luggage attached (especially for Christians and anyone who grew up in a puritanical culture) that the plane can’t get off the ground. Yet, whether we want to accept it or not, desire and passion make the world go around, so to speak.

In 1953 Hillary looked upon that mountain knowing full well he would live or die in his attempt to summit. Remember, they didn’t even have oxygen tanks or Gortex back then. He knew he was in trouble in the same way we know we are in trouble when we fall in love the instant we are introduced to someone. Trouble. Can’t stop thinking about someone. Trouble. What do I do? Do I risk? Do I hide? Do I run? Do I concede, “she’s out of my league?” Do I completely avoid the whole potentially messy involvement because I don’t know how it will be beneficial or detrimental? Do I look upon the insurmountable and believe in the attempt, in the approach? Am I going to learn something beneficial no matter the outcome?

Not that I’ve asked myself these questions lately ; )

“Trouble” in this sense is not to be avoided (that's another kind of trouble), nor are we meant to go headlong without wisdom and temperance of our desire and passion. Of course you know that I really mean this. May I remind you that I take medications to accomplish temperance!

So, imagine Hillary NOT taking the inordinate amount of time to plan the execution of his ascent of Chomolungma. He had to find other crazy people like Tenzing Norgay, his sherpa, to join in his insanity. He would have squandered his passion if he’d gone headlong. The dangerous species of risk is the risk that jumps in without temperance, time, wait, patience, and love.

Passion, good passion, can indeed be squandered. The most beautiful picture of passion and desire is the sacred final and brutal hours of Jesus’ life, appropriately termed “the Passion of Christ”, which encapsulates and illuminates LOVE itself. Jesus had tunnel vision. He embodied risk. “WHAT?” you exclaim. “No”, you say, “Jesus KNEW he wasn’t risking…he knew the outcome.” I beg to differ. He knew that many of us would not care one iota and would reject his incredible love. Unrequited love is the most painful, and once you’ve experienced it you might understand how much risk is involved. I mean, couldn’t God have sat on the whole idea of Jesus’ dying, shelved it and come up with something with greater prospects? I can imagine Jesus one day, early on before he took it on the road, looking in the face of an abused woman, an angry young man, or a beautiful child, feeling passionate love for them swell his heart.

I image him thinking, “I’m in trouble.”

Risk is what progresses us if it doesn’t kill us. I guess that is what I’m trying to say. I’m also saying that I struggle to understand my “limitations” and live boldly in the face of them, or even despite them. When I am manic I take very dangerous and often irrational risks. It feels bold and exhilarating. Feels like real living. Yet it only mirrors passion and desire. It is a charlatan. Perhaps I have learned more than most about boldness and risk for these reasons. It is not because I am courageous. Maybe my more than average vigilance has produced a keen eye. A cop knows a criminal when he sees one. A criminal also knows a criminal. Even more than a cop knows a criminal.

There’s no good way to describe the pain of clinical depression. You’ll never understand it if you haven’t been there, and you must thank GOD right now if you’ve never been there. There is no good way to spell out the finality with which one experiences life. It is as if life is over. Not “as if” but really over. There’s no viability, no thriving, and a lot of pain. There is no convincing otherwise. Depression is an ending. She who resides there is out of chances and second chances. Contrary to popular belief it isn’t self-hate or loathing, it is pain that drives the hand to suicide. Perhaps, being rescued from the grip of suicide, I now know what life is. Maybe I’m even glad for that lesson…but I can’t even say that without hurting deeply inside. I’ve seen death alone a hundred times, and stopped short. When I look at living without risk it really feels like that place. And I think, “Why would anyone intentionally chose that or any approximation of that?” In some ways I see that I have two options. Live boldly or die.

In my eyes, if I’m not engaged in one I’m engaged in the other. I guess I feel pretty passionate about that : )