With great effort, I lifted my leg from the bed and attempted to stand, screaming in pain before allowing gravity pull me back down onto my bed. Sobbing, I succumbed to the nightmare that had become my life: at 16 years old, the rheumatoid arthritis in my knees was so aggressive that on days like this, I couldn’t even get out of bed or walk across a room.
On days like this there was no getting around it– the shit had officially hit the fan.
“Uncompromising reality” is what Dr. Kent Hoffman, one of my greatest mentors and teachers, calls situations like these. When we get sick, when someone dies, when our hearts ache and our souls break, whenever we find ourselves in situations we can’t wiggle our way out of, this is when we feel lost at sea. We find ourselves floating without an anchor, without a life preserver, with no shore in sight and no north star to guide us.
When we’ve reached our limit, when we can’t escape and we don’t know how to cope, where are we to turn? What do we do when shit hits the fan?
Society would tell us, “Stay in the feel-good. Reach for more of the never-enough: more possessions, more winning, more pleasure, less pain. Keep chasing, keep gaining, keep running and eventually you’ll escape– eventually you’ll find happiness.”
But when we can’t escape, when uncompromising reality slaps us in the face and bears down upon us, we realize that our current strategy is no longer working. When the feel-good fails, we have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We can find no solace, and we’re falling apart. We haven’t a clue what to do.
We’ve got money channels, food channels, sports channels all over TV. We don’t have any “What do I do when the [stuff hits] the fan” channels.
- Dr. Kent Hoffman, The Spokesman Review
Our salvation, as it turns out, lies not in seeking more of the feel-good, but in realizing that our pain, our burden, is beyond our current capacity to experience on our own. Contrary to our deeply held belief, what we most need is not the absence of pain, but someone to share that pain with– someone who is willing to go into the deep, dark crevice with us and to shine a light in that place we dare not go alone.
What we most need is connection. We need to reach out.
When we are faced with something we can’t change, regardless of our vain attempts to make it different, and we do it all alone, then we hit a wall and fall apart. [But] when you can’t wiggle out of it, and you seek the support you most need, really remarkable good things can happen.
- Dr. Kent Hoffman, The Spokesman Review
And so we risk opening and we cry out for help– help from others, from our community, help from God, from the Universe, from whomever or whatever it is that gives us solace. And suddenly we realize we aren’t in it alone. ”My pain” becomes “our pain.”
Because it is not the pain that’s the problem, but rather the burden of holding this pain on our own– this pain that is too big for us, this pain that is beyond our current capacity to make sense of and to bear.
When shit hits the fan, our escape lies not in escaping, but in resting in the middle of it, and in coming to trust that we are safe and held even in the midst of hell on earth– in coming to experience a truth, a love, a holding that is so much deeper than the words on this page.
… in every spiritual tradition that I know of we are being asked to trust, regardless of our external conditions. I don’t think accessing the sacred is a way of stopping bad things from happening. I think it’s about finding a sense of connection and necessary resource no matter what’s happening. For me, it’s a way of trusting that God’s presence is deeper than my current experiences of either happiness or suffering.
- Dr. Kent Hoffman, The Spokesman Review
And so we open: we open to others, to life, to the support that we most need.
And when we find that shared vulnerability, that sense of safety and comfort and community, when we can face the pain directly and allow ourselves to crack open, we find that the crack is here for a reason: it is here to let grace in.
Instead of finding destruction, we find what it is we most need, what we most require.
In the midst of our pain– not in the absence of it– we find what’s most essential.
When everything else falls away, we discover that which cannot be shaken, that which cannot be destroyed, that which will never fall away– the foundation of Who We Are, that which has no words.
Some call it God, some call it grace. Some call it community or relationship or love. I’m not so concerned with what we call it or where we find it as much as I’m concerned with whether we come to find it at all.
When shit hits the fan, open.
Reach out!
Cry out!
Stop trying to go at it alone.
When shit hits the fan, let it.
Let it soften and not harden you.
Let it open and not close you.
Let it break you to your core, and find what’s unbreakable.
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If this spoke to you, please share it with others.
[Image by Jose Tellez]
Not how you think.
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