Exhausted and Exhilarated: Riding the Rollercoaster of Life
This piece was written in October 2022, one month after my mom’s transition back to spirit. I took a late season cruise from Vancouver to Alaska - one that my mom should have been on - to get away from work and life for a while. Sitting on the ship’s deck, docked in Ketchikan, I watched a large group of seagulls for some time playing and squabbling in the bright afternoon sun. I was grieving, and trying to find meaning in my mom’s life, and her death, as we do in such times. Reading this back now, I am surprised and encouraged by how certain I was, even in those sad times, that life is absolutely a thrill and privilege to experience.
Nothing is allowed to flourish completely unchecked. Watching seagulls, envious of their freedom in flight. It seems effortless, but it can’t be. Flight takes effort. Better to say it is natural for them. The physics and mechanics of flight makes sense to them in a way they cannot articulate, nor do they feel the need to. It is us observers who struggle to explain the mystery of their natural abilities. The observer is often marvelled by what the doer simply does.
Even seagulls, as many as there are spread over wide swaths of geography, have not achieved utopia. Predators, disease or age will claim them all at some point. All freedom, all flight, must eventually end as death is the one agreement all must make when asking for the privilege to experience life on this beautiful planet.
Knowing our lives must end could destroy the enjoyment of our time here. And yet, a rollercoaster ride also only lasts so long and we know this before paying the price to get on. We pay ridiculous amounts of money for two to four minutes of excitement, terror, and discomfort. As the car inches up the first climb, we feel the fear and anticipation rising, knowing the first drop is going to cause our stomach to flip, our feet to tingle. And with white knuckles gripping restraints, or waving defiantly overhead, a primal scream escapes our lungs during the drop. We squeeze our eyes shut, barely aware of what is happening, catching breaths in the brief reprieves before the next climb, then fall, then twist and turn.
And all too soon it over. Exhausted and exhilarated, we laugh and shake off the adrenaline rush as our car coasts to a stop. Stepping back onto the familiar stability of the platform we marvel that we survived the entire episode and say silent thanks to the skilled hands that built and maintain the track so that we could enjoy a reasonably high expectation of making it through. This despite the fact that at times, we truly believed it could also just as easily fall apart.
Again, the key is that we know the ride will end. It will be a brief period of intense sensation that will both thrill and pull hard at our deepest fears. Still, curiosity or need for adventure caused us to willingly climb aboard, buckle our seat belt and prepare to be hurled through time and space. And chances are, this is not our first time on this ride.
So what keeps bringing us back? What is so important or addicting about this ride, this life, that we step out of a place of expansion, understanding, and cosmic connectedness to come to this place of blindness and raw physical senses, struggling against feelings of separation and being locked into choices or outcomes that we didn’t choose or don’t understand? Is it for the sheer thrill of the ride and to feel things in a way that life in spirit cannot provide?
Perhaps we are driven by an unquenchable longing for touch, to hold and be held, to make things or smash them with our clenched fists. Life’s purpose may be to be close to or collide with the physical and emotional boundaries of others in their bodies whose thoughts and motivations are a mystery. What changes about our daily lives if we consider the possibility that we came here to have a brief moment in the length of eternity where nothing is known for sure, all is unscripted and where your experience is literally in your own hands?
It is almost comical to think that the purpose of life may lie in the fleshy, lumpy, achy, beautifully imperfect bodies we inhabit. We come to this life for the physical experience. The body is the reason and what we do with it or create with it is the expression of the joy of being in it. We can create good or evil, bring light or dark, accumulate things or experiences, the choices are endless.
This does not negate or make light of the fact that what we may look back on as twists and turns were very real and traumatic events that left us and those around us changed in ways we may never fully process. To suggest we chose to experience life does not at all equate choosing to experience ill treatment at the hands of another. As mentioned, we all have the capacity to create good or evil in this world and that means we may fall victim to someone else’s shadow, or the shadow of tragedy, accident and misfortune.
But if we can stay focused on our ability to choose how we respond to life, and remember that all of the emotions we feel are known to us only because of the complexity of our mind/heart/body connections, it may open the door to feeling more empowered when life turns us upside-down, travelling 100 miles an hour heading for another breathtaking rise and fall.
P.Giesbrecht/October 2022