Welcome, welcome, one and all, particularly anyone reading these ramblings for the first time. Today is my birthday, and on this day of my coming to be I’m sharing with you a totally-me kind of mashup including movies and books and…other things. We’ll see how this birthday present to myself goes. You may learn more than you wanted to know about how my brain works.
In the meantime, again, thanks to all of you who support this work by reading it and sharing it with others. As well as being my birthday, today is the day that I flip the switch on the subscriptions feature. My deepest gratitude to those who pledged support early as Founding Members, but remember, you devoted readers who began at the beginning, you will continue to receive all the newsletters and the occasional invitation to special events, when those special events start to happen in 2024. Subscriptions to this newsletter support the continued work, but they don’t buy special access to what is created here. It is up to you if you change your status to as a subscriber.
And now, about remembering how to live a little more dangerously…
Have I even seen the whole movie?
As the days pass, memories sometimes get blurry, don’t they? This is particularly true for me in my relationship to popular culture like movies and television shows. At this point, I couldn’t swear that I actually saw the entire 1982 movie The Year of Living Dangerously. I know that it starred a young Mel Gibson, the talented Sigourney Weaver, and introduced the American public to the talented Linda Hunt. But the movie title…and what I know of the story…all of that lives to this very day somewhere in the soul of that gray matter known as a brain and I can’t be certain how it came to take up residence. I know that I saw enough of it to have cellular memory of the feeling of it. So I wasn’t totally surprised when these were the words that popped into my consciousness when I started thinking about this particular birthday event.
The story that made the feeling…
Let me share what I do know, just in case you’ve never heard of the movie. This film was part of the Australian invasion, a series of movies made by an influx of Australian creative talent that seemed to overwhelm our screens with something new. The Year tells the story of the Indonesian revolution of the 1960’s and the unseating of authoritarian President Sukarno. That story is told through the eyes of Australian journalist Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson). Guy faces a series of moral and ethical choices as he chases the story from the inside, with help from a British diplomat (Sigourney Weaver) and his Chinese photographer (Linda Hunt). At its root, the movie is about choices and their consequences.
Why this is important now…
I am not an expert on Indonesian political history and I am certainly not an expert on this movie. But I remember the movie as a razor-sharp ride of chaos and fear that left the viewer to experience an intensity of being totally alive in the moment, every moment. Living dangerously is on my mind.
Did I say that today is my birthday? Well, it is. Does your family have a mythology about your natal day? Mine did. First, there is the story that said that the weather, the day of my birth, was uncharacteristically warm — 66 degrees and sunshine were not, in those days, normal February weather in Kansas City.
The other mythology has more to say to me about what my theme of living dangerously, or, at least, about living impatiently. My mother liked to tell the tale this way: on the 26th, she went to her regular appointment with the obstetrician. When the doctor listened for my heartbeat (remember, I’m old, stethoscopes were the high technology of the day), he heard nothing. Other people came to listen, and they heard nothing. My mother, however, insisted that she was in labor. No one would believe her, in that special way of the medical profession. They sent her to the hospital in an ambulance, the doctor believing the worst and my mother believing the best. As the tale is told, she barely made it to the hospital before 9 lb. 6 oz. me appeared with a full head of dark curly hair. I was coming whether anyone believed it or not, and I was apparently ready for action.
While today’s birthday is not one of the “big ones” it is a milestone of another kind. Today I now share the chronological age that was my father’s last on this earthly plane. Being a person made of memories, there is part of me that has been feeling more like I’ve reached my sell-by date than just another birthday because of that knowledge. I’ve had this feeling once before. I was convinced that turning 18, the age of my brother when he died, would be my last birthday celebration on this earth. Clearly, that was not true. The way I approached that sad anniversary, however, did lead me into a year of chaos, fear, and not the very best decisions for my life.
I am determined that I will not repeat the experience of my 18th year. And I am determined to shake off the dusty fear that still grips me from my living of the past several years so that I can embrace more of the energy with which I came into this world. But, how do I get from caution and fear to living dangerously? What does that even mean?
A piece of paper with answers…
When I don’t see a way forward, often, I clean. You may have picked up that theme in some of my other musings. This particular birthday became one of those “need to clean” moments; the focus of said cleaning became the files on my desk that had been there…well, who knows how long. As I worked my way through handouts on scintillating topics like plagiarism and paraphrasing (for my writing class in August term) and supervision guidelines for spiritual directors (for another time, friends, for another time), I found a simple piece of paper with 9 questions and the title “Hollis’s List of Narrative Forensic Questions.” There was no citation or reference on the page. It was in a pile, nestled between recipes for “Creamy Caramelized Cabbage Pasta” and “Gambas al Ajillo,” just where you would expect to find something meaningful in the chaos that sometimes consumes my desk. It didn’t matter that the page had no citation, because even without my beloved Turabian guidelines it pointed me in just the right direction to ask the next question.
When I find it impossible to live differently, I turn to my books, if not for answers, perhaps for the inspiration brought by new words. I’m sure that surprises no one. This particular stark list of questions caused me to return to one of my favorite writers, Dr. James Hollis, author and Jungian analyst. One of the things that draws me back to Hollis over and over again is his willingness to accept the idea that life's biggest questions do not have fixed answers AND that this lack of answers does not change the fact that we must ask those questions over and over again. We must seek the answer of the moment knowing that it will not last. For some of us, that is the only way to live the life before us.
And so, in pursuit of temporary answers, I opened another book. And as I began to read A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity (2023), Hollis offered these paraphrased words from the writings of Carl Jung, words that grabbed me by the spirit and just wouldn’t let me go:
The spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear. Only boldness can deliver us from fear. If the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated.1
The italics are mine. I’m always grateful for Hollis’s ability to render Jung’s words more digestible. Hollis’s restatement offered me everything that I needed to consider when asking the question about what it might mean to live dangerously in the year ahead: “only boldness can deliver us from fear.” Only in boldness (and I mean boldness, not recklessness) do I have the chance to live at all. Somehow the idea of boldness allows me to hold fear and possibility together in one container, and yet, to allow possibility to win.
To live dangerously?
And so, we return to my theme. What will it mean to approach my life from the perspective of living dangerously? Honestly, I’m not sure that I know. I know what I have not been doing: I have not been living in boldness. I have been living in fear. I intend to change that.
And so, in the year ahead, we will have many more questions. Taking a cue from Step 4 of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, I must be willing to take a ruthless moral inventory of my actions and my choices, and I must be willing to do this over and over again. Which returns me to my piece of paper…”Hollis’s List of Narrative Forensic Questions”…clearly just the list I need. And as I cleaned and considered, I finally found the source of the list — I compiled it while reading Hollis’s The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves (2022). Here, Hollis offers these questions (and others) as the tools to probe our past stories, edit them, and create new ones to support a different way of living. And the question of the day is the first one on my Hollis list: Who am I, apart from my history? That is just the question I need right now.
To live dangerously? Ask the tough questions and don’t look away from the answers. They are only the answers for now, because you have to keep asking. Questions without ceasing. Questions, not bungee jumping. Happy birthday to me. Join me in a question or two?
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In the coming months, there’ll be more talk about Carl Jung and fancy ideas like active imagination and alchemy, so I hope that you will keep reading and sharing and reading and sharing. And the invitation is always open to leave a note or start a conversation!
James Hollis, A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity , Kindle Edition (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2023), 30.