Pegmatite
I am a rock person. Growing up in boulder-strewn “New England,” that’s probably not a surprise. But I am always fascinated by the wide range of textures, mineral compositions, and appearances in all of them. But pegmatite is a particular favorite.
For one, it was born from intense fire and pressure. I know how it feels.
Volcanic magma was forced under high pressure into granite fissures underground. There it cooled slowly, taking eons to become its final “self.”
Again, I know that feeling. It’s taken me a lifetime to distill into my current form.
Second, it is complex. Because it cooled slowly, it is composed of concentrated amounts of a wide range of minerals and chemicals. While other rocks shot out of the volcano and cooled quickly, the liquid that formed pegmatite was the soup of all kinds of leftover minerals that just sank to the bottom of the magma. To look at a piece of pegmatite is to see that it has many facets — dull whites, sparkling flecks, glassy surfaces, and deep mysterious blacks.
And it is precisely this complexity that makes it valuable industrially. It contains such a wide range of chemicals and minerals that its uses range from gemstones and ceramics to microchips and aerospace components.
Maybe the same is true of all of us, especially those of us who were born of fire and pressure and had to wait a long time in life to become “us”?
In any event, for a rock lover, pegmatite is an infinite joy. No matter how often I look at it, I find myself always seeing something new and different. I just have to turn it around in my hand and view it from a new angle, and I will see something I never noticed before.
So pegmatite taught me that it’s all about “revisiting” it, studying it deeply, and looking at it from new angles. Or, new eyes, as the Buddhists say.
What’s the bottom line?
Now, in life, I am often an impatient, “bottom-line” person. Just give me the final takeaway. So of course, I LOVE “to-do” lists. I love itemizing every single thing I want to accomplish on a given day. Then, best of all, I revel in slashing a thick dark line through one of them as I complete a task.
It is that exhilaration of “I have worth because, ‘LOOK! Look at all I did.’” And it is the relief of knowing there is one less responsibility on my plate. If I did it, it’s finished. Done with. I can forget about it and move on. There was a line in the movie, Patton, that I definitely relate to: “I don’t like paying for the same real estate twice.”
And then there’s the straight line
Life itself feels the same way, because it has so many metaphors for “milestones accomplished.” Aside from checklists, another popular one is a straight line. We’ve all heard the maxims – keep moving forward. Move on down the line. Or the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The Greek mathematician, Archimedes, said it thousands of years ago, so who am I to argue? Thus, the bottom line takeaway must be that “progress is linear” because Geometry says so.
And how many examples of it do we see in everyday life? You’re on a long car trip that feels endless. But you have evidence of your progress because you keep passing exits, AND those exit numbers change as you progress to your destination.
So, of course, especially early on, I had the illusion for my therapy that if I worked hard enough, I would be able to cross off the benchmarks on my “to-do list of healing,” and reach “normal.” And if I did it quickly, I could get to normal even faster. Just put my head down and bull forward. Then, each milestone achieved would be my own highway of changing exit numbers that I would never have to see again.
That “demoralizing circle”
As to this expectation, I know I am not alone. So often I read something written, especially by abuse survivors, who feel like a failure because instead of “completing some benchmark of healing and being done with it, they find themselves dealing with that same issue again and again and again. It’s like one of those nightmare movies where you leave the hotel, travel a long distance, then round the bend only to find yourself back at the hotel again. Just one big circle. Demoralizing.
Just a few examples of mine.
- Why did I spend most of my life looking for a “mother” in all my relationships?
- Why did my friendships with women go poorly for so many years?
- Would “trust” ever come?
- Why was I filled with self-loathing?
- Would my fear of emotional abandonment by friends ever stop?
- Was I really worthy of telling my story OUT LOUD?
- Did others REALLY love me and see my worth?
- Did I see it in myself?
Even though some of these haven’t come up in a few years, I have no doubt some incident will trigger one of them to rear its ugly head and catch me in its claws yet again. When that has happened in the past, I felt like such a failure.
I mean, there are ones I have struggled with my whole life. At those moments, the voice of judgment in my head would write me off as some immature little child just unable to grow up. Or a fool who couldn’t seem to “get” the lesson. I wanted to rip my hair out in frustration that “yet again,” I circled back to that “hotel,” just like in the movie.
The circle is the ANSWER
But over the years, I have finally started to understand that “circle” wasn’t the problem. It was the answer. The problem was my understanding.
“Resolution of the trauma is never final; recovery is never complete. The impact of a traumatic event continues to reverberate throughout the survivor’s lifecycle. Issues that were sufficiently resolved at one stage of recovery may be reawakened as the survivor reaches new milestones in her development.”
Judith Herman, M.D., from Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
That one caught me. Did this mean that while we revisit the same issues through life, it’s actually because we had made PROGRESS? And that progress brought up a new facet of that issue for us to reflect on?
Christina Baldwin, in her book Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story, points out that we need to reflect and revisit, again and again, the powerful moments of our lives. She notes, “There is a wound that lives in uncompleted stories.”
Well, none of us is ever “completed,” no matter what our background is. But we can always be moving toward “more complete.” It suddenly occurred to me that what I thought was the “normal process” – that straight-line progression down the highway of life — was the error. Maybe all of us, if we are open to continuing to learn and grow, are MEANT to “circle back” and revisit those same events?
“In working with the spiral of experience, significant moments come back around again and again, allowing us to harvest insight. Every time this cycle recurs, we have the opportunity to reflect and articulate the still unexplored territory of our stories.”
(Baldwin)
I keyed in on her use of the word “reflect.” She wrote that, “Reflection is the first step in making sense…Reflection helps establish a sense of mental order. Order is a relief….”
As an aside, for those of us who survived trauma, I would capitalize and bold those last four words: “ORDER IS A RELIEF,“ because in abusive households, there is neither.
I’ll write more about “reflection” later, but for now, the realization I finally started to see was that the actual path of a richly lived life is “revisiting to reflect.” Again and again. Because each time, we are doing it from a different place in our lives. We are not the same person who thought about something a year ago or five years ago. We are a new person in the present moment. Thus, we will see things from a brand new angle this time, which means new insights, too.
The bigger picture
All of this effort helps us to put another piece of our story back together. We integrate all those broken pieces of our lives into a bigger picture and start to see what it all means. As Baldwin notes, we ride “the spiral to articulate the story of integration.”
I feel that myself so often. Every time some insight, even a small one, appears out of the fog of memory and finally comes into sharp focus, I feel a swell of both joy and relief. The joy of learning something new I hadn’t seen before, and the relief of having one less thing “gnawing” at me.
Even as I know it may come around again if it is significant enough, that is okay because that means my understanding of myself and the meaning of my life grows. It’s like adding another step to the staircase of life. You get to climb a little higher and see things from a whole new vantage point. That gives new meaning to the idea of life “as an adventure.” Maybe sometimes the richest adventures of life take place within, not in some distant land.
It just depends on the view
So whether it is turning that piece of pegmatite around and around in my hand, or looking at some aspect of my life that won’t let go, the “takeaways” are infinite, surprising, and rich. They just depend on “the view,” that is, where on the spiral road we are at.
Tags: faith, life, love, mental-health, writing
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