Vulnerable

As I get older, I dread winter more each year. I am now 55, and it all comes down to one big worry: slipping and falling on the ice. I have visions of myself cracking a hip or twisting an ankle. I sometimes even worry about hitting my head. 

The strange thing is, it's been years since I slipped and fell on the ice. I remember once when I was in my early 30s, I was walking to the bus stop to go to work, and a thin layer of snow covered a slick spot on the sidewalk. My legs flew right out from under me, and I landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me. But in the subsequent years, I didn't worry about slipping and hurting myself as much as I do now. Getting older has made me feel my vulnerability more. 

I have always been vulnerable. I could have cracked my head open when fell onto my back. But I didn't feel this vulnerability as I do now. When I was younger, I just assumed nothing bad would happen; I assumed away many of the dangers of this world. I imagine most of us do. Now, I can't do that anymore.

Recently, I have found myself reflecting on the vulnerability of all life forms. There is a thin tree right outside my bedroom window. It occurred to me one day how easy it would be for anyone with an axe or a saw to kill it in a matter of minutes. It's a pretty tree with deep auburn leaves. It would be a pity if it went. But it could go at any time.

I sense how I, too, am vulnerable like this tree. I could get hurt or killed at any time. Any life form could. Then I have the counter thought: but life itself is tenacious and everywhere. While individual life forms are vulnerable, life in general is not. To take an extreme example, our space technology, for all we know, could have already brought earthly bacteria to the atmosphere of Venus or the surface of Mars. Life in general is hardly vulnerable.

From the angle of life as a whole, the seeming vulnerability of individual life forms may be delusory. Am I as vulnerable as I think I am? Are any of us? What, exactly, is it that's vulnerable?

Thich Nhat Hanh in a number of places in his writings points out that I am as dependent on the sun as I am on my heart to be alive. Without my heart, I couldn't live. But without the sun, I couldn't live, either. I need its warmth. I need the energy it gives to the plants I take in as food. I need its light. In this sense, the sun is a part of me, as is my heart. The idea that I somehow start and end at my skin is just that, an idea, and not a very accurate one at that.

Of course, I need more than the sun to live. I need the biosphere. I need the ecosystem. I need my community and society. All of this sustains me. Yet I rarely heed it. How often do I consider all I owe the sun or the bacteria in my gut that helps sustain my digestion or the trees that create the oxygen I breathe?

A snowflake drifts down from a cloud, floats where the breeze takes it, lands with other snow on the ground, and eventually evaporates or melts. It doesn't resist this cycle. It just takes its part in it, neither resisting nor pushing, not trying to control.

I am more like this snowflake than not. My biological and chemical processes, most of which I am unaware of and are still a mystery to science, connect me to the biosphere and ecology in ways well beyond the scope of my conceptions. I manage to breathe, my organs secrete necessary fluids and hormones, various bacteria and other parasites live in me and help my processes to work. The vast majority of my life I neither resist nor try to control. I just drift and move like the snowflake falling down in the breeze.

But this is not the part of me I usually focus on. I focus on that small part of my experience I do have some small control over—and this part is about the size of a single snowflake in a great drift. My feelings of vulnerability stem from this small, localized focus that I distort into thinking is bigger than it is. 

Nonetheless, slipping and falling on the ice hurts. And it could cause some serious, even permanent, damage to the body. Somehow, I sense that my feelings of vulnerability would lessen if I could see myself and my life in a wider perspective, one that sees the boundary between self and other, between the sun and the trees and bacteria and what I call me, as delusory.

Who is this self who could slip and fall on the ice? It's perhaps most accurate to say this self, as is true with all selves, contains the universe. But, again, this is not my usual focus. My focus is on specific ideas of myself that help me get through my day. For instance, I think of myself as a father so I call my daughter to see how college is going. Do these ideas correspond with reality? Probably not. Their job is to help me get things done, not to accurately reflect who and what I am. 

If I do slip and fall, people will probably come over to help me. This is how people are. Their response would probably be as unthinking as the snowflake drifting down in the breeze. I know I have automatically come to the aid of someone who fell.

I live with faith in my fellow human beings and the biosphere itself.

So I grow old. I will suffer and die. This biosphere will absorb and discard my ideas of myself. But it won't get the big Self, the one that is connected to and has always been connected to the biological and chemical processes of this planet and the entire universe. That big Self is like the snowflake drifting down and eventually melting. It just transforms into something else when the time comes.

The difference between a snowflake and me is my self-consciousness. But we exaggerate the extent of this self-consciousness. Frankly, I wonder if a snowflake doesn't have some small degree of awareness. Recently, all existence has seemed so vibrant and electric to me, that I believe awareness is as much a part of things as chemistry and physics. Perhaps, in the end, we are much more like that snowflake than we may usually think. This is neither good nor bad. It just is. 

This is my answer to my feelings of vulnerability—that I partake in a Whole way beyond my tiny ideas of self and its fragility. But this answer only half satisfies. Part of me wants to resist and say, "But I am SO much more than a snowflake." However, deep down, I don't think I am so different. I am fragile, unique, a momentary crystallization that fades into a greater Whole.