Masked Marvels

I haven’t gotten used to it. I haven’t met anyone who has. It is somewhat of an obstruction like none other as we now find ourselves masked in public. I have struggled with why it seems so unusual, beyond the obvious reality of it being new for most of us. When I think of masked people, my mind, first and foremost, goes directly to superheroes, Marvel Comics, and even wrestling commercials which flash by while watching television. It is, more often than not, primarily men who are trying to hide something about their identity. The mask is a way of entering into character, releasing their invincibility against their human opponent, making them, in one sense, like “gods”.

There are many reasons why it feels uncomfortable to us but, quite pointedly, it has become a barrier to our own humanity. From the time we are kids we learn to react to the facial and body expression of other people, from parents, siblings, teachers, and the rest. We come to rely on others to express how we should feel or how to react in different situations based on the other person. We know when someone is happy, sad, excited, angry, and downright outraged and we react to their human expression. It becomes so habitual for most people we aren’t even aware it’s happening. When people are happy, we react by being happy for them. When people are angry, especially at us, we do what it takes to eliminate and diffuse the situation. As kids, it tends to be a great way because they haven’t quite fully grasped the wide array of feelings and emotions within us. Most have not been taught how to handle the feelings and emotions or at least their varying nuances.

However, as adults, things change. It wasn’t until I started going out wearing a mask to stores and such which something just didn’t seem right. A friend had pointed out to me, then, how the mask has taken away the facial expression to which we learn to react. Quite frankly, sometimes this is a good thing, especially when you find yourself around grumpy people in stores! However, I couldn’t help but notice the sense of shame and guilt I had been experiencing when I went to stores, as if I had done something wrong, and I had no one to affirm otherwise through smiles or nods. It felt almost criminal. It was like confronting a void, of sorts, something which had been stripped of us for which I, like many, come to rely upon. For some it feels like a stripping of their humanity and freedom, whatever that means. But there’s more to it.

For some this may be the first time in life reckoning with their own life. It may be the first time where we have no one else to tell us how to react, now finding ourselves as masked marvels. We become so reliant on “outside authority” to tell us how to think, feel, react, we become void of our own humanity, literally separating ourselves from our interior life. Not many can argue we lack depth as a culture and society. We can see it just in how our leaders act and react to one another. We’ve become so dependent upon others we’re left not knowing how to feel or think on our own. Is it any wonder why so many would protest placing something over their face? How will they know how to feel and what emotions emerge? How will I know how to react to varying situations? It’s revealing just how bound we are by our own darkness and why we want to fight for “freedom”.

Here’s the gift to the mask. The mask has simply turned the mirror inward. We know longer have the external “mirrors” allowing us to react and so we’re being given a lesson in self-discovery. It’s why I was so conscious of the feeling of guilt and shame when I entered the store. There was no one there wronging me in any way. It was my shame and guilt I was confronting. When I encountered others in the store not wearing masks, it was my anger staring at me. When I had run into a teacher from my childhood it was both my joy to see her but at the same time my own sadness not being able to stand in the store and catch up in any way. The mask, whether we know it or not, is giving us a great gift but like some gifts we don’t always know what to do with them, or for that matter, don’t even want the gift in the first place, feeling no need for it.

Like the masked marvels from comic books and the big screen, they both disclose and conceal something about ourselves. They may, in some ways, conceal our own humanity from others, but they are inviting our own feelings and emotions to disclose themselves to us. All it takes is a little awareness on our part as to what’s arising as we find ourselves wandering and meandering with this new reality of masks. It’s an opportunity to be happy and joyful for ourselves, not just because it’s a reaction to someone else telling us how to feel. Most importantly, it’s a time to confront so many of the negative feeling we tend to push onto other people through blame and victimhood and surrounding ourselves with others in the same way. If you’re angry, mean-spirited, feeling shamed or malice, welcome them home as the poet Rumi writes in the Guest House. They are yours and acceptance moves you to being more fully human.

I’d imagine we’ll spend years if not decades ahead questioning and learning all of which this time is trying to teach us about our humanity, revealing our selfishness, our values, or even lack thereof, but maybe most importantly growing into the person we often seem to know the least, ourselves. It’s too easy to react to the seething anger, the belief of rights being trampled, and the backlash towards leaders, but all of it is revealing something about ourselves and who ever would have thought it would be mirrored through a mask? Rather than digging into being the “gods” we think we are, a simple piece of cloth is inviting us to lean into what has lied dormant and hidden, our own humanity, teaching us to love the other and empathize with all who are truly hurting in this time, including ourselves.

Courage to Wander

Since its inception in 2002, the top-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, has sold more than 32 million copies worldwide. It has also been translated into more than thirty different languages yet transcends all languages by the asking of the most basic of questions, “Why am I here?” Now I’m not writing to explain how this book has answered the deepest questions in my life. As a matter of fact, I have never even read the book! My point is this, for a book to sell so many copies worldwide is a clear indicator of how many people have felt lost in their lives. That sense of feeling lost has a way of unnerving us on our deepest levels, despite the great Tolkien truth, “Not all those who wander are lost.” I suppose for some the feeling is mutual, wandering and lost. It comes with a sense of a lost purpose and meaning, precisely why a book like The Purpose Driven Life sells. It’s part of our human nature to be connected and to have purpose and meaning.

It’s not, though, the way many live their lives. Some feel as if the world, life, the government, whomever, is out to get them for one reason or another and have a sense of being trapped in life. It can be finances, relationships, or even a sense of duty that has a way of yanking freedom from our lives leaving us depressed and outright angry towards life. It comes in all walks of life, bitter men and women who have an axe to grind. I life less examined is a life unlived. It will certainly leave anyone feeling lost and alone, lonely despite the people that surround their lives day in and day out. In the end, we still lie down at night by ourselves and with the weight of a day and unexamined life, the darkness seems to hang just above the tip of the nose, weighing us down even in our moments of supposed rest. Rest becomes restlessness.

We have so access to so much at our fingertips. We have more information than our brains can even begin to process and understand. We look to win arguments rather than listen. We practically look for a fight simply to prove our rightness, a shadowed pride needing to be tamed. We resort to the lowest common denominator out of the shear fact that it’s the way we have lived our lives. The unexamined life has no other choice but to settle and to live in fear. We have convinced ourselves of being deserved nothing more out of life. Our sense of duty is incomparable to anyone else but the price leads us further consumed by our own pain that has left to often rot within our core. We have lost our sense of purpose and meaning and somehow it’s everyone else’s fault for the way I feel. The life of constant victimhood has no freedom because it has yet to take responsibility for the choices made. The life of victimhood and blame lacks meaning and purpose because it still chooses to trust the most ill-trusted voices, the voices of others who live an unexamined life.

Yes, we do have it all at our fingertips, but the desire for meaning and purpose will never be found in a book and nor will it come from some authority dictating life for you. If it is, they too have yet to examine their own life and are negligent in the landscape of the heart. We have become, at least by appearance, a heartless people. We are clueless in the matters of the heart because of the pain we carry with us as individuals and as people. Vengeance and bitterness, yelling, needing to prove rightness, are all matters of the ego, and a wounded one at that! Allowing ourselves to be consumed by pain moves us to a heartlessness separating us from our own humanity.

We settle for religious leaders who themselves are wolves in sheep’s clothing. We settle for political agendas to dictate how I am to think and what I am to believe. We settle for political leaders to be a moral compass, despite their own desire for power. We settle for lies over truth because we no longer know what truth is, a marked indicator of that separation from our humanity and a broken heart. We settle for duty, often to things we hate, simply because we lack the heart and passion to catapult is to a more fulfilling lived life. We are a hurting people who are trying to navigate the heart’s landscape with damaged ego’s leading us further into lostness and no longer wandering.

It would seem as if this is all gloom and doom and have the desire to simply throw our hands up and giving up. However, it is that passivity that leads us to that sense of powerlessness. Our natural inclination is to react to it and abuse that power against others, positions, taking advantage of others we have deemed less than ourselves. However, to live a life with purpose and meaning requires us to take control of our lives while at the same time surrendering it to the unknown. Quite frankly, it is what scares us the most. The unknown feels like “out of control” and feels like “falling” and feels like “lostness” and even like “hell”. It is, though, our ego that desires control and status quo, stability, safety, despite the very fact that none of it is true. The landscape of the heart, in some ways, requires us to go against the grain of what we have been told and taught. It’s an act of unlearning so much of what has been learned, for good or for ill. It’s an unlearning of thought patterns and beliefs of self. It hurts and is painful but no less than the silent pain we live with daily when we refuse to look into the arid landscape of the heart, an unexamined heart and life.

We all desire meaning and purpose. It’s at the heart of who we are. We may not always know what it looks like, but we know it evolves over the course of our lives. The way we parent or are friend are different from when we are 25 and when we are 50 and 70 and beyond. It not much has changed and we live with bitterness and resentment, then we have work to do. It doesn’t matter the age. As long as we have been given breath for another day we have the opportunity to live an examined life. It may come in the form of working with a therapist, coach, counselor, psychiatrist, or simply a loved one who understands and has done the hard work of an examined life and heart. If you’re unsure, a good indicator is the way they empathize. It’s not about sympathizing, as if they don’t have the ability to walk in your shoes. Rather, about empathy, walking with the other. They come with wisdom and the ability to simply listen without judgment. Their heart breaks with you as you wrestle with your life and what has been clung to over the years.

More often than not it is our pain we hold onto. We are a people that hurts and have been convinced of the only way of dealing with that hurt is to run and literally get lost. We have been convinced of consuming when we hurt, buy up all we have and yet resulting in a pain that only runs deeper, as if seeping from our toes. Meaning and purpose is possible for everyone and doesn’t require anyone else to change but you. It begins to change the way we see the world around us and most importantly, our own self. A life and heart examined reconnects us in ways, moving us to wanting more out of life and finding ways to seek it, no longer lost but wandering. Yet, no longer wandering through a lost world, but through a heart that we have yet to know. As if wandering through our favorite place but now with a sight that sees.

Do yourself a favor if you find yourself looking for meaning and purpose, don’t buy a book telling you to follow certain steps, and all of a sudden, it’s found. Rather, buy yourself time. It’s the cheapest thing you can buy for yourself and yet the most beneficial. Make the time for silence. Make the choice to seek out wisdom figures who can accompany you on your journey, who can listen to your pain without judgment or condemnation. Choose to turn off the television, especially while listening to the people you simply agree with; it feeds the ego like a rabid wolf. Find the time for you even if it means disappointing others. Care for something or someone beyond yourself, even if it means digging your hands in the dirt. Digging in this way can do more for the heart and soul than any book! In time, the fear of losing control, surrendering, and falling will become swallowed up by courage, not to conquer the world, but simply take a step to a new way of life. It’s not only that you should demand such a life but the world needs you now to live that life, one of purpose and meaning.