A Soothed Nervous System Soothes Nervous Systems

“At 33, I knew everything,” writes Anne Lamott. “At 69, I know something much more important.”

Tomorrow, I turn 47, so I suppose I might know something a little more important than I did fourteen years ago. For instance, when I was 33, I just wanted to be happy. All the time. I thought that was the whole point of everything. To be happy.

However, at the time I had five mortgage payments on two residences, neither of which was worth what we owed—that’s a story for another day—and I had three children under the age of seven. So I wasn’t happy all the time. In fact, I was so stressed and exhausted I thought I might have Parkinson’s. I just couldn’t stop trembling, and it sure wasn’t happiness I was shaking with.

Mostly, though, I think I wasn’t happy because I thought the whole point of life was to be happy. E.B. White once said, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” Happiness is a little like that. You can try to be happy all the time, but you’re almost certain to kill your happiness in the process.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t ever be happy. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.” Happiness, when it happens, is almost always a byproduct of valuing and cultivating something else. For the rabbi, it is wonder and awe.

For me, at 47, more and more it’s peace.

Coincidentally, it was in my 33rd year that I started an annual Christmas ritual—every year at the beginning of Advent I re-read the second chapter of Luke, the story of Jesus’s birth. I meditate on the story throughout the season, and every year for thirteen years a different element of the story has revealed itself to me as particularly meaningful. This year, however, nothing was speaking to me. It was a little unsettling.

Then I came across these words from An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum: “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.” It was as if the young Jewish woman was amongst “the great company of heavenly host” who appeared to the shepherds in Luke 2 and declared “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

Peace.

More and more, it’s peace I pray for. Peace in me, so there can be peace around me. A soothed nervous system soothes nervous systems, it has been said. More and more, I’d just like to become an epicenter of peace in the world. Also, if I’m being honest, I treasure peacefulness because it’s simply more pleasant here inside my skin when I’m at peace. Perhaps by the time I’m 69 like Anne Lamott, I’ll value it entirely because it spreads.

In the meantime, I’m learning that peace works a lot like the game we played on my son’s virtual reality headset after Thanksgiving dinner. In the game, you take an elevator to the top of a skyscraper and, when the doors slide apart, a wooden plank is in front of you, extending off the edge of the building. The game is to walk off the plank.

If you think that’s easy, you’ve never been in a VR headset.

I came to the end of the plank several times before retreating into the elevator. Then I took a deep breath, quieted myself, and noticed something. I could feel the hardwood floor beneath my feet. While on the plank that was disconcerting because it simulated the wood of the plank, but, I reminded myself, it would still be under my feet in the real world when I stepped into thin air in the virtual world. So, I walked off the plank, feeling the floor beneath my feet.

That is peace, I think. It isn’t the absence of fear or uncertainty or risk. It’s the faith that something is truer than all that. It’s the experience of standing on something solid, even when all your senses are telling you that you are falling and in great peril. It’s the lived belief that there is something you can count on at the bottom of everything.

I don’t think I’ll spoil anything by quoting the final words from The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell:

…the whole field is humming with something, every flower vibrating with sound, and the sound is singing, and the song is grace, and it resonates with the tuning fork that is my soul, sending ripples of joy throughout me and to the edges of me and beyond. This goes on for a long while and it never gets old…This is the grace at the bottom of all things. It is God underneath everything. And it is beautiful-er than anything I can imagine.

Blessings upon this season, friends. May it be a time in which you reclaim large areas of peace in yourself and come to discover that you are, perhaps all evidence seemingly to the contrary, standing on solid ground.

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