Midway Through the Journey of Our Life
My thirty-fifth birthday is tomorrow, and I’ve been thinking about Dante, specifically the opening lines of The Divine Comedy:
Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.
Inferno, Canto 1, lines 1-3
I remember from studying this text nearly a decade ago that scholars generally acknowledge that Dante literally means halfway through “our” life, the 70 years traditionally allotted to humans in the Bible. So, he’s 35.
It’s also interesting to me that he wakes up in a mysterious place full of symbols and emotions—a “wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn.” As if whatever he was doing before was the dream, and reality is the journey he’s about to take through Hell.
Do I find this foreboding, as I approach this momentous halfway point? Yes. Yes I do.
Another thing I’ve had on my mind lately is the concept of “threshold guardians.”
One way of describing threshold guardians is just painful emotions. Things we don’t like and don’t want to feel, like sorrow, rage, betrayal, self-recrimination, humiliation, and so on.
But if you buy into the idea that growth comes through confronting and moving through discomfort, you can view these feelings in a different way: as sacred guardians of new realms of insight, ability, and harmony with the world and other beings.
I don’t believe that suffering always leads to growth, or that it should, or that those who suffer most are the most spiritual, or that they came into the world with a heavier karmic task than those who suffer less.
But I do like the idea of threshold guardians as an organizing principle in my own life.
Dante encounters three of them in Canto 1: a swift leopard, a hungry lion, and a greedy she-wolf. As he’s limping up the side of a mountain, these animals keep getting in his way. They don’t touch him, but they fill him with such dread that he turns around and heads back into the dark wood.
I love these Botticelli illustrations of The Divine Comedy.
I can identify with the urge to retreat. One of my biggest threshold guardians is embarrassment. You could say that the she-wolf of embarrassment has been guarding significant thresholds for me for a long time.
She’s a weird beast. If you know me very well, you know I’ll tell you anything. I love admitting to my faults and mistakes, laying out all the ways I could be wrong, and generally creating an appearance of being very humble and approachable.
But I cringe in horror at the thought of being caught red-handed in the middle of a mistake. Of being wrong without having anticipated it. Of looking stupid, unreflective, or inconsiderate.
And this horror has kept me from doing a lot of things. Like writing publicly. Pursuing professional and artistic opportunities. Expressing unabashed joy about things and with people I love.
I could glorify my brand of embarrassment by saying it points to values of thoughtfulness, consideration, and adaptability, all qualities I prize very highly.
But I sense that there’s some foolishness in setting these things up as opposites. Even if you could prevent embarrassment with thoughtfulness, no one could ever be maximally thoughtful. You can’t know everything and thus avoid being wrong, although I often catch myself making that my very project.
It’s not until Dante is back in the darkness where he started that he encounters Virgil, his all-time hero and the guy who’s about to lead him through the most enlightening journey he’s ever been on.
At this point in the parallel, I get even more terrified.
Every now and then for the past year, there’s been a message coming to me in two different forms. Sometimes it’s give up, sometimes it’s cut me loose. (Which both sound, now that I think about it, like 90s grunge songs.)
These are what have come through in my more extreme moments of upset and longing. I take them both to mean the same thing: stop striving for order, comfort, and self-improvement. Stop thinking something better is out there to be worked for. Stop persisting in efforts that at best will get you more social approval or an easier material existence at some point in the future.
This is a tough mental track to follow, because at this point things like meaning and motivation start to dissolve.
But I do wonder who or what would be waiting for me in the dark if I let myself be annihilated by what I fear. If I let embarrassment get its teeth around my throat and rip out something vital.
I haven’t given up, not at all. I’m hustling harder than ever. I took this entire week off intending to do some birthday chilling and guess what: I’ve worked more than I have all year. At this point in my life, there’s more than ever to work for. A home, a partner, a dream, a hurting world.
So I’m not sure where that leaves me with regard to giving up. One truth is that I am uncomfortable all the time: embarrassed, fearful, confused. Another is that I am going to post this deeply embarrassing missive on a public platform.
There are 14,233 lines between Dante, age 35, waking up in a dark wood and eventually glimpsing God at the top of Heaven, lines in which he witnesses the worst horrors he’s ever seen and is knocked witless and heartbroken countless times. On the other hand, the entire journey takes place in six days, between Good Friday and the Wednesday after Easter. It’s short but it’s long, and vice versa.
I have a feeling that I haven’t yet lived the hardest moments of my life. I also hope I haven’t yet reached my best. We’ll see.
