Well, sort of.
Full disclosure: I am not now, nor have I ever an actual, factual Marine. Nor have I played one on TV, though I did wear my brother Dale’s Army fatigue shirt a lot during the 60’s.
No, what I’m referring to is the story in Sunday’s New York Times about how women are soon to be invited into the inner sanctums of barf-your-guts up, have-a-heart-attack-and-die Marine training.
I think it’s great for women to have all the opportunities a man does (though, frankly, I’m a bigger fan of the talk forms of peace-making than the attempts that use violence).
But what got me was the line: “…let a guy dig down and find himself.” I know that’s a phrase guys use a lot for these intense physical things they get themselves into (like when you’re down by a run and the count is 3 and 2 in the bottom of the ninth)
It’s also a phrase, though, that’s pretty familiar to those of us on the road to an ever cleaner way of living, where nothing comes between us and pure, unadulterated living. Nothing. Not excess or toxic food, not drink, not shopping-till-we’re dropping, not even obsessing over this that and the other thing.
In my life, I’ve dug pretty deep, as have my pals who are trying every day to make a good and decent life.
Sometimes what I’ve seen has been pretty scary. One of the scariest things is knowing that there’s always more to learn. But on a good day, that’s also the fun stuff, especially when we drop cruel judgements and just, well, take a deep breath and hang in there. Dig down, I mean.
Are you a digger? I am. I have to be. Not in a warlike way on myself or my life, God help us. Honesty without compassion is violence, says Pema Chodron, author, among other things, of, When Things Fall Apart. But mining for the true me is the only way I know how to live, clean, abstinent and sober from all the junk that wants to take me down.
From Pema’s book I distilled the following as the ideal approach to the mining process:
When life nails you:
- Stop there. Hold
- Don’t act out
- Don’t repress
- Don’t blame it on anyone else
- Don’t blame it on yourself
- AND you will meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer
- AND you will encounter your heart
Thus trained, you’ll be ready for anything.