Who among us doesn’t view themselves as a fierce protector of themselves?
You’d think we were all Roman centurions given how we reinforce the idea that, figuratively speaking, we’ll run as many people through the gut as needs be in service of “protecting my peace.”
We act like everyone else is hell-bent on plunging us into a roiling sea of chaos. We’re on our “healing journey,” and we can’t wait to broadcast that to anyone we buttonhole in a corner or to our social media followers as they declaim similar sentiments.
What we end up doing, though, is electing to imprison ourselves in a cave rather than go forth in the world, Easter-style.
As a kid, I didn’t mind attending church because there were going to be these stories. The stories would have nonliteral meaning — as the best stories do, whether they came from literature or an accounting by your best friend about that dodgy guy at the bar on Saturday.
Easter’s version of this kind of story concerns a man who goes into a cave and knows that if you’re going to do this, or be made to do this, it’s always best to come back out. Otherwise, you’re just interred, and who wants that?
Turns out we often do that now without knowing it. We miss out on so many things — and people — we could love on account of nursing this notion of protected peace.
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The language we use says a lot about it, whether or not we mean to. It’s the ultimate tell. Pay attention to how someone talks, and you’ll learn how they want you to see them, which itself is revelatory in terms of who they really are — because rarely do these two strands intersect.
The overreliance on phrases such as “protecting my peace” and “committed to my healing journey” betrays what’s tantamount to a language of isolationism. We simply call our isolation by other names. We dress up our aloneness, our aversion to trying to connect, in rhetorical raiment. We’re fooling ourselves with descriptors that make it ever easier to keep fooling ourselves.
For instance, we might extol “rotting” on the couch, but in essence, that means we’re a moldering body in that cave. But staying on the couch is due to “other people,” after all, and we need time away, which easily becomes a life away.
People, of course, can be horrible. Finding a truly good one these days — someone who maintains worthy baselines of bravery, humility and realness — feels near miraculous. The last quality may be the rarest in the world at present.
Who is real with you? With whom are you real? When are you really real with yourself? Hard questions with hard answers, but, paradoxically, easier solutions.
We’re the obstacles jammed in the exits of our caves. Our attitudes, our hang-ups, our fears. We needn’t come back from the dead so as to rise. We’re here right now. We’re free to pop our head out, keep that head up, go for a stroll, look people in the eye and do an essential version of “How do you do?” Being real is the best kind of faith.
Our response to Easter evolves. When you’re a kid, it’s candy. Later, it serves as a challenge: to regenerate. Reject stagnation. In short, to grow.
To me, it’s the holiday of Walt Whitman, of Henry David Thoreau, of protean living. Of nailing one’s excuses to their own crosses and leaving them there.
It’s a call to spiritual arms, which has nothing to do with organized religion, but that which lives inside of us and makes us, us — when we allow ourselves to be.
In the cave, there’s darkness, and that means there’s less to see, to feel bad about and take responsibility for. This isn’t protecting your peace — it’s a dead certain way (pun intended) to never know what peace really is.
And it’s definitely not the Easter way, which is a year-round concern. In fact, it’s an eternal concern because it never becomes less relevant. Peace isn’t something you protect, as much as it’s something you go off in search of.
I promise to keep an eye out for you, if you promise to keep an eye out for me.
Colin Fleming is the author of “Sam Cooke: Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963,” an entry in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.