“As a man thinketh, so is he”. (Proverbs 23:7)
The other day an incident happened that left me struggling to restore my inner equanimity. I thought I would process it in a blog, but, having already written about equanimity a dozen or so blogs ago, I looked for an approach that would best restore my physical, mental and emotional well-being. Ultimately, I chose to process it through journaling, or what psychologist James W. Pennebaker calls “expressive writing”. More on that later.
The incident that triggered this disequilibrium happened the morning a large female monk seal hoisted herself up onto the local beach. Reports vary on how many monk seals (estimated at no more than 1,400) populate Hawaiian waters, but the words “rare” and “endangered” invariably crop up when the seal is discussed or, in this case, when she comes in to sleep on the patch of sand that is our usual water access. The spot where a stream of outrigger canoeists, paddle boarders, snorkelers, power boaters and swimmers enter and exit the ocean in increasing numbers now that summer has begun. Needless to say, it’s not an ideal situation. While conservation officers patrol, and signs and makeshift barriers are erected around the seal to keep people at bay, some beachgoer inevitably wanders too close and elicits a volley of sharp warning barks from this massive sea creature. (An adult female monk seal ranges in size from six to eight feet long and weighs four to six hundred pounds. Not one to be messed with.)
On the morning in question, I registered with horror that a two year old toddler was making a bee-line for the sleeping seal, while his mother was preoccupied with his baby sibling. Seeing what was unfolding like a bad dream, I vaulted out of my chair, dashed down the beach and grabbed the young lad just as he reached the tail end of “Mrs. Monk Seal”, as she is known to children around here. Thank goodness it wasn’t her head! This she reared up immediately, her throaty barks warning us off as I scrambled for a footing in the soft, wet sand. I now understand the expression: “time stood still”, as I pitched down onto my knees, calling frantically for someone to grab the little boy, whom I couldn’t lift up the bank, and out of range of the irritated seal. Within seconds the whole incident was over, the poor baffled child was returned his mother, where he hid from the maniac (me) who had so rudely interrupted his trajectory.
Meanwhile, I crumpled onto the nearest chair, gasping for air, heart racing, too stunned to move. Joan Didion’s “Life changes in a heartbeat” flashed through my mind. But, thinking I’d made enough of a spectacle of myself for one day, I tried to shove the incident out of my mind and spent the rest of the morning paddling in and around the water with a new-found, four-year-old friend who enjoyed pushing a boogie board between a mooring buoy and a couple of inflated rafts anchored just offshore. Child’s play, as they say.
Later, however, the event haunted me throughout a restless sleep. Visions of what could have happened flooded my chest with a kind of latent dread. The next day I had a roaring headache and was utterly zapped of energy. Nursing a pulled muscle in my leg that registered once the shock wore off, I simply couldn’t restore my balance and equanimity. I realized I had to pro-actively change the inner narrative of “coulda, shoulda, woulda” that only compounded the recovery from what my rational mind told me was a relatively minor incident.
Enter a New York Times Opinion article that I encountered early this morning which addressed what I was attempting to do — revise the story that was running overtime in my mind. What psychologists call my “narrative arc”. Writing about the human tendency to put the pandemic behind us without a backward glance, Author Emily Esfahani Smith urges her readers to pause for a beat before getting on with their post-COVID revelry. Advising the reader to reflect on the story they’re telling themselves (or denying) about the past sixteen plus months, Smith writes:
“…if we want to emerge from this crisis whole instead of broken, we need to process what we’ve lost. Rather than bulldoze past our grief straight into the delights of summer, we should take the time to work through it.”
She describes how one’s story-telling style, one’s way of framing events as positive or negative, can influence one’s wellness on multiple levels. And ultimately, set the course of one’s life. While therapists and spiritual counselors are also recommended, Smith advises the reader to try “expressive writing” as a means of processing the many changes and losses that the pandemic has wrought.
Citing Dr. Dan McAdams, a personality psychologist, Smith introduces the idea of narrative identity. “Most people, whether they realize it or not, carry an ongoing narrative in their minds about themselves — who they are, where they came from and where they are going. We consciously and unconsciously create this story by taking the disparate fragments of our lives and assembling them into a coherent whole.
“Dr. McAdams encouraged people to divide their lives into chapters, recount major events, reflect on early memories and pull out the overarching themes in their narratives. After analyzing these stories, McAdams found that some people tell what he calls “redemptive” stories while others tell “contamination” stories.”In layman’s terms, the redemptive story is one in which we frame our experience, although sad or difficult, in a way that offers some grace, some silver lining that enhances our wisdom and understanding. Depending on what we tell ourselves, even a ’bad’ experience can be put in a broader context that ’softens its edges’. By contrast, the contamination story is one in which we conclude that an event has no compensating features, and, to some degree or other, has irreversibly wasted or ruined some or all of one’s life.
Obviously, the monk seal incident is easier to put in context than my year plus of ’girl interrupted’ by COVID. But the same theory applies. As does Smith’s and McAdams’s advice. Expressive writing (aka regular and consistent journaling) is an invaluable tool for making sense of life’s events. Over the next couple of days I took time to un-pack — in writing — what was lodged in my memory as a “bad” day at the beach.
For one thing, I learned a lot about the little boy with whom I spent the rest of the morning. I learned that he was recovering from what his mother later explained were three cancer-related operations and a year of chemotherapy. During COVID.
Floating alone-together on a small raft in the Pacific Ocean, this brave little lad told me the story of his “big surgeries” and how he got a present when it “ended”. He must’ve been three when his cancer journey began. Who knows what impact that experience will have on his particular life narrative? I doubt it was the first, nor will it be the last time he tells his story, but relating these events to other people could be seen as the child’s attempt to process a bewildering, and no doubt painful time in his very young life. His version of expressive writing. Hearing him trying to pronounce words that are foreign to most four-year-olds, my heart filled with empathy for him and his family. Four people who were, only hours earlier, simply strangers at the beach, immediately became the newest members of my Aloha Ohana.
A redemptive story about the-monk-seal-that-interrupted-my-morning, if ever there was one.