When we are infants we are helpless. We cannot tend to our needs and have no agency as to our movements. We lack the power to exact our will onto the fabric of our reality.
This is why they wail. It is their only protest against the enforced dependency. Not until you feel helplessness in adulthood do you fully appreciate it. There is one crucial different however between the helplessness of childhood and that of adulthood.
A baby is often tended to with kindness and compassion when they cry out. Their inability to exist unaided is relished and understood by their caregiver. They are showered with love and adoration. Making the helplessness feel more bearable. They are soothed into understanding that it has a function. To elicit this love and care, and deep understanding from another.
In adulthood this soothing comes from a much less obvious place and is often in short supply.
As you enter adulthood you shed the childish helplessness felt in the face of you parents' will. Their unspoken expectations. I remember shedding it the day I moved out into the dirty, ancient loft on the corner of H* street. I do not recall the actions necessary to bring it about. The gathering of things, the assembling of minimal furniture. But I remember the feeling as a crystalline shedding of dependence. The small apartment, up three flights of rusty stairs and behind a busy city cafe only really had one big room. It looked out onto the corner of the street. Creaky wooden floors, low ceilings and the bastardised Georgian windows of the mid- 1800's offered light into the space. It was cosy and dark and tilted.
Beautiful.
I do remember the act of my parents assembling my bed. It was the one I used in childhood. A tiny, child-sized wooden affair. I secretly liked its smallness, and the torn netball stickers on its backboard. Its positioning in this alien environment signalled freedom. I also remember the latent disappointment in my parents. They hated the place. And the more they did, the more I loved it.
It had creaky steps leading into a corridor towards this one big room, a slightly refurbished bathroom, and a spare room where I resolved to keep my shoes until I acquired a roommate. One of my friends kindly referred to it as "Parisian". But I was blind to the squalor; the fact that to access it I had to go behind the café and its brimming bins and climb up bright green metal stairs to arrive at the grimy door to my sanctuary. On the first day I bought a bright pink plant, which promptly died from neglect, and happily settled in. Nestling into freedom.
Every day when I made my creaky way to the room peppered with my clothes, and beautiful impractical shoes, I felt content. I felt as far as possible from helpless. The din of traffic, cafes, people, the city a few streets away, hummed beyond the window. I relished the walk into work. My heels making clinking noises on the metal stairs where the bottom sole had worn away on the much-too-high heel.
Fast forward ten years and the helplessness rears its head. I lie in bed, heavy with a much-wished-for second child. My ankle is throbbing from a near fall earlier that day. My nose leaking from a sickness that won't abate. And progesterone spreading through my insides, in an attempt to hold the baby in place. I feel I have no agency and no control. Although this is not entirely true, I feel the extremes of it because this is my first real taste. Of youth slipping away and of becoming dependent on a body abused by time and decades of demands. The feet are bruised and broken from the years of beautiful shoes, and their click-clacking on those metal stairs of freedom. I do not know what agency will be denied me around the next corner; that of choosing how far I can walk, of being well or carrying child to term. The first taste is bitter indeed.
How to meet this sharp edge of disappointment? In youth you feel unable to steer circumstance in your favour, and approaching middle age, you realise instead your body is much less manoeuvrable to your whims. You feel viscerally the helplessness of flesh losing its power.
And so you remember back to the infant stage. The absence of a parent necessitates you to look within for kindness, understanding, patience. Equanimity in the face of a bawling infant, only now it is your childish rebukes to not getting your way that you must soothe. You need to access these higher feelings of compassion and kindness, as the realisation dawns that this feeling will now visit more and more often. Unsolicited and unexpected.
Perhaps the meeting of this edge comes from looking beyond this stage. At my grandparents, at the end of life. Where helplessness is only a skip away from death; the ultimate loss of control. Appreciating their resignation, but also their gratitude for the little things. For hearing their great-grandchild laugh. For still being here.
We all want to persist. And in that there is a poignancy which may be the gateway to understanding. The knowledge that every human being, no matter their status or significance, has fought against helplessness and oblivion and chosen to persist. There is honour and love for life contained in this rebellion.
Let us therefore envelop our frail beautiful bodies in this understanding. Meet the hard edges with kindness. This is where the lotus flower finds its nourishment. Its farail beauty does not exist without the mud of pain, suffering and enforced helplessness. Its this mud that enables compassion to bloom through this "manure of transformation" (Gilbert & Choden, 2013).
Without the darkness and difficulty we cannot awaken the compassion necessary to soothe these. Without feeling truly helpless we cannot access these kind, accepting and nourishing parts of ourselves.
Let our stages of helplessness disarm us to the love which has always been beneath the mud.
References
Gilbert, P., & Choden. (2014). Mindful Compassion: How the Science of Compassion Can Help You Understand Your Emotions, Live in the Present, and Connect Deeply with Others.
Nha, T, H. (2014). No mud, no lotus: The art of transforming suffering.
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