THE SUN ALWAYS RETURNS
It has been almost two months since my last article and
surely you were waiting for a particular article I’ve mentioned previously. As
you know I like to give free flow to my dominant inspiration. Two stories got
me thinking hard these days. So, bear with me in these stories as we reflect
and think together.
One morning in August 1919
seventeen-year-old Milton Erickson awoke to discover parts of his body suddenly
paralyzed. Over the next few days the paralysis spread. He was soon diagnosed
with polio, a near epidemic at the time.
As he lay in bed, he heard his mother in another room discussing his case with
two specialists the family had called in. Assuming Erickson was asleep, one of
the doctors told her, “The boy will be dead by morning.” His mother came into
his room, clearly trying to disguise her grief, unaware that her son had
overhead the conversation. Erickson kept asking her to move the chest of
drawers near his bed over here, over there. She thought he was delusional, but
he had his reasons: he wanted to distract her from her anguish, and he wanted
the mirror on the chest positioned just right. If he began to lose
consciousness, he could focus on the sunset in the reflected mirror, holding on
to this image as long as he could. The sun always returned; maybe he would as
well, proving the doctors wrong. Within hours he fell into a coma. Erickson
regained consciousness three days later. Somehow, he had cheated death, but now
the paralysis had spread to his entire body. Even his lips were paralyzed. He
could not move or gesture, nor communicate to others in any way. The only body
parts he could move were his eyeballs, allowing him to scan the narrow space of
his room. Quarantined in the house on the farm in rural Wisconsin where he grew
up, his only company was his seven sisters, his one brother, his parents, and a
private nurse. For someone with such an active mind, the boredom was
excruciating.
One day several months later, as he sat near a window in a
special reclining chair his family had designed for him, he listened to his
brother and sisters playing outside. (He had regained movement in his lips and
could speak, but his body remained paralyzed.)
He wanted so desperately to join them. As if momentarily forgetting his
paralysis, in his mind he began to stand up, and for a brief second he
experienced the twitching of a muscle in his leg, the first time he had felt
any movement in his body at all. The doctors had told his mother he would never
walk again, but they had been wrong before. Based on this simple twitch, he
decided to try an experiment. He would focus deeply on a particular muscle in
his leg, remembering the sensation he had before his paralysis, wanting badly
to move it, and imagining it functioning again. His nurse would massage that
area, and slowly, with intermittent success, he would feel a twitch and then
the slightest bit of movement returning to the muscle. Through this
excruciatingly slow process he taught himself to stand, then take a few steps,
then walk around his room, then walk outside, increasing the distances.
Somehow, by drawing upon his willpower and imagination, he was able to alter
his physical condition and regain complete movement. Clearly, he realized, the
mind and the body operate together, in ways we are hardly aware of.
Indeed, the sun returned so did Erickson. By his experience and the observations, he was able to make on his family members Erickson went on to become pioneer in hypnotherapy and one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century.
We don’t and will never know what really went through the mind of the young Erickson. I believe that even if himself has to write the sequence of events that went through his mind, he will have hard times doing so, fortunately we don’t need him to tell us.
Someone said. “life is what happens to us while busy making
other plans”, we might get to a point of our life emotionally murdered by
events. We get to a point where we are afraid of tomorrow because of our
internalized trouble.
The trouble within is like a fire in appartement with gas everywhere and no
windows to evacuate. What do you do when is burning inside? To whom do you turn
and how do you turn? When a tree is falling everybody will notice and people
who never paid attention will have something to say and even find the reasons
why. So when falling people negative´s opinion will rush your fall. Even
amongst people you are absent and alone because your mind is consumed by the trouble
within. Erickson was glued to a bed and needed something external without
boundaries to give him hope. Although hope is materialized by the sun, all started
within Erickson, within him was the source of his miraculous recovery. He looked
for the sun because he desired to live. So when the winter of his life came, and
his all body got frozen, his mind was hot and running. This got me thinking of
a tree standing just right in front of my windows. Just as certain trees in
winter it loses its leaves but it still stands tall and shows me its beautiful nakedness
and when summer comes it introduces me to the beauty of greenness. Why do we
humans fail to do so?
Allow me to tell another story before getting to our conclusions.
William James born into a wealthy
and prominent family, from birth suffered life-threatening health issues: an
eye problem that left him temporarily blinded as a child; a terrible stomach
condition that caused excessive vomiting and forced him to adopt an obscure and
highly sensitive diet; trouble with his hearing; back spasms so bad that for
days at a time he often couldn’t sit or stand upright. Due to his health
problems, James spent most of his time at home. He didn’t have many friends,
and he wasn’t particularly good at school. Instead, he passed the days
painting. That was the only thing he liked and the only thing he felt
particularly good at. Unfortunately, nobody else thought he was good at it.
When he grew to adulthood, nobody bought his work. And as the years dragged on,
his father (a wealthy businessman) began ridiculing him for his laziness and
his lack of talent. Meanwhile, his younger brother, Henry James, went on to
become a world-renowned novelist; his sister, Alice James, made a good living
as a writer as well. William was the family oddball, the black sheep. In a
desperate attempt to salvage the young man’s future, James’s father used his
business connections to get him admitted into Harvard Medical School. It was
his last chance, his father told him. If he screwed this up, there was no hope
for him. But James never felt at home or at peace at Harvard.
A few years went by and, again to his father’s disapproval, James dropped out
of medical school. He then signed up to join an anthropological expedition to
the Amazon rain forest. There, once although surviving the first days he got
sick again and was left alone in the
middle of South America with no clear way to get home—a journey that would take
months and likely kill him anyway. He somehow made it back home.
By this point nearly thirty years old, still unemployed, a failure at
everything he had attempted, with a body that routinely betrayed him and wasn’t
likely to ever get better. Despite all the advantages and opportunities, he’d
been given in life, everything had fallen apart.
The only constants in his life seemed to be suffering and disappointment. James
fell into a deep depression and began making plans to take his own life.
But one night, while reading lectures by the philosopher Charles Peirce, James
decided to conduct a little experiment. In his diary, he wrote that he would
spend one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything
that occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he would do
everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood
of failure. If nothing improved in that year, then it would be apparent that he
was truly powerless to the circumstances around him, and then he would take his
own life.
William James went on to become the father of American
psychology. His work has been translated into hundred languages, and he’s
regarded as one of the most influential
intellectuals/philosophers/psychologists of his generation. He would go on to
teach at Harvard and would tour much of the United States and Europe giving
lectures. He would marry and have five children (one of whom, Henry, would
become a famous biographer and win a Pulitzer Prize). James would later refer
to his little experiment as his “rebirth,” and would credit it with everything
that he later accomplished in his life.
Turning my mind in those two stories I came out with the
following conclusions:
·
In order to look for hope outside we need to
have it within otherwise not even a divine help will change our fate. No boat gets
anywhere unless it leaves the dock. Well, it could get somewhere, remaining
still at the same place it will only get rotten and will have to be crushed and
dumped somewhere.
·
“The grass is greener on the other side” we use
to think but we fail to see that has better care by the owner. Realizing that
we are the owner and therefore responsible for this garden changes
everything. There is a simple
realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the
realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives,
no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to
us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us. Even we choose not respond to the events in
our lives is still a response to the events in our lives. We are always
choosing the values by which we live and the metrics by which we measure
everything that happens to us.
As the old and famous poem goes:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of
circumstance I have not winced nor
cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and
tears Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years Finds
and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the
gate, How charged with punishments the
scroll, I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Written like this is difficult for common men like us to relate to it, so please allow me to rewrite it like this:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my troubling soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have winced and cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is
bloody, I bowed many times not knowing why and having no strength to hold up my
head.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
looms, the Horror of the shade, and the
menace of the years finds and shall find
me afraid and still preparing because after all I am new in this business of living.
It matters not how strait the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll, I have decided to master my fate and
guide my soul to a place where life means happiness.
I am hereby leaving this dock
where a friendly chain was holding me tight for my safety. Its definition of safetiness is no longer comfortable for me. I welcome the wind,
the strong waves, I welcome all because I’m living.
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