I GREW UP IN A WAR 2023/10/23
After the first session of the Creating Happiness 1 seminar, I woke up the morning full of hope, delight, excitement. The morning after the second session was different. During it I yawned, almost continuously for 45 minutes, with the yawns getting deeply and more frequent until I could not stand being in on Zoom any more. The morning after I felt despair, overwhelm, with a why am I doing this? conversation. Today, the morning after the third session, I am even more upset, disoriented, feeling as if, as if you poked me, a river of tears would stream out.
I have taken this seminar before, but this time, am finding it challenging and upsetting. Not surprising then that this is turning out to be about the war, the war I grew up in, and, specifically, about what happened to my family, my mother’s family, when Uncle Jack died, six days after my first birthday. He was a squadron leader in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, and on June 20th 1940, he was flying to Norway in his Skua, and, in heavy cloud collided with another plane, and crashed about a mile offshore off Norway. His death devastated my mother.
Concomitant with the seminar is my going through the family photo album, with pictures from WW I, pictures of Uncle Hugh and Uncle Amphlett, as lieutenants in the Royal Navy, in uniform, the former on HMS Ramilies and the latter on HMS Hood. And pictures, taken by Amphlett, of cities all over the world, crossing the Equator, visiting Paris, Utrecht, Gibraltar, Trinadad, Rio de Janeiro, and places in Germany, Italy, and America
The second session I began yawning around 7:30, and by 8:00 I was yawning so frequently and so hard, I left. The third session I began yawning at 7:15, again about every minute or two, plus I became more and distracted and distractable. I would bring myself back, hear a sentence or two, and get distracted again, until, as with last time, I left the seminar.
It was 1998 when I first took Wisdom 2. On the second weekend, Angela Amado, the course leader, told us about the vacation courses offered in the program. Many of them such as Transforming Yesterday’s Strategies, a week-long conversation about what it is like to grow up male or female or other, or Mission Control where the participant gets to look at how they organize their life, and Structural Explorations, which looks at how we operate in our bodies. That was the one I signed up for—skiing in Aspen.
At the first meeting, Sarah, the course leader, asked us to go around and shake hands with the rest of the class, looking them in the eye, saying something to introduce ourselves. And to feel how that was, to feel the physical sensations as we did the exercise. After, when Sarah, asked, “What did you get from this”. I realized that every time I shook hands with someone, there was a distance, a separation, a reluctance to connect. This was the structural course, so it was all about what my body was doing, and I felt, in my body, in my core, that connecting, making a link was dangerous. The thought that came was they were going to disappear on me, die on me, go away and never return, which is, essentially, what my mother did when Jack died. She left, emotionally left, and really never came back.
When I got back to Minnesota, when I returned home, to my seminar in Edina, I was changed. I stood up in front of the class, having them roar with laughter as I talked not only about the experience I had that first day, but how, on that last day of skiing, going down West Buttermilk 3, the easy part of the ski area, yelling to the world, as I slowly, slowly did my ski turns, yelling “Gravity is my friend”, a suggestion by one of the course supporters, an Olympic coach, to think about falling into the mountain rather than off it.
It’s an amazing thought, a true game-changer that, when all the chaos was erupting around my world, that now, in my late 80s, coming from a past of being bombed, that I survived, and that I could, indeed, be peaceful at that moment. I don’t have to shiver in terror when something unexpected happens. I don’t have to freeze when driving down route 52 and the National Guard troop carrier goes over my head. I don’t have a blood pressure spike when, on Marshall Avenue, going towards Minneapolis, the train goes overhead.
I can live in that all is well with my world
In the photo (probably taken by my grandfather), the athlete closest to the camera is my Uncle Jack
1 https://www.landmarkworldwide.com/advanced-programs/master-class-series
2 https://www.landmarkwisdomcourses.com/vacation-courses/
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttermilk_(ski_area)