In the swing of things

I have been thinking about swings this morning. I am still reading Anne Lamott's latest book, and I came today to the chapter in which she buys a cheap rug for the nursery of her Sunday School, discovers a moldy spot, attempts to return it, and can't get her money back.

It's an injustice, of course, and she finds herself in what to me is a very familiar pattern: someone bumps or hurts you in some way, and the swing is set in motion. "Injustice!," we cry, as we notice we have been pushed away from our comfortable center. That sense of injustice peaks, and we begin the swing back through the center to the other side, and fury takes over.

In the height of fury, we lash out at the other person, and then the fall begins into guilt and self-loathing. To reassure ourselves, we push back with self-justification "He pushed me first!", but however high that propels us, there is still something in us that knows we over-reacted, so we fall back again. If we are lucky. the back and forth, the fight or flight mechanism, eventually settles down and we are centered again.

But more often we get stuck, both as individuals and as groups: stuck in fury, like the suicide bombers of Al-Qaeda, or stuck in the fake apologetics of political correctness. And of course there are those for whom the swinging feels more alive than just sitting in the center. For them, the swing must always be in motion, and if there is no actual injustice they will invent or imagine it, for the thrill of the rise and the fall.

It seems to me that the point at which the swing is most steady, when our feet can touch the ground and the ropes to which we cling are perfectly vertical, is the point when we are most in tune: with God, with nature, with humanity... it is the point when everything seems very even.

But of course we don't get to stay there very often. And even if life is being very fair to us on any given day, we know it is surely unfair to someone else. Perhaps our compassion for that keeps us grounded and in tune, centered? But I am thinking we complicate things with our entitlement issues: we think we are entitled to keep or hoard what stability or security we have, so that any fluctuation in blessings initiates the swing again into perceived injustice, reactionary fury, and back into self-loathing and self-justification.

It's a tricky question: what is acceptable, and what is not? What do I deserve, and what am I willing to put up with? Here the vacillation begins in earnest -- ouch, I have been mistreated; fury, how dare they; guilt, I probably deserved it; whine, these guys are such creeps. And I think it is when we reach the whining stage that we begin to recruit fellow-sufferers, reinforcements for the journey. If we are lucky, they pull us back to center and hold the swing steady so we can choose to step off if necessary.

But often the friends we find in misery are on swings of their own, and instead of returning to center we end up in a sort of collective spinout, and suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of what feels like a war, choosing sides, assessing weapons, planning strategies, building arsenals, holding war councils...

So then I thought about war, and the hopelessness of it; all the mistakes made on both sides; the centuries of injustice that fuel the conflicts in the middle east as well as family feuds; that sense that nothing could ever set things right, that all hope of balance has been lost.

The fact is that life is unfair, wealth and power are unevenly distributed, and there will always be imbalances. Perhaps it is in the decisions we make in attempting to deal with that imbalance that we manifest the strength and stretch of the vertical connection in our lives. Because the further away we are seated from that branch to which the swing is tied, the longer the swing will take and the farther we will travel from center.