Salvaging the Circumstance

Your Own Way

Coffee in hand to combat the cold and the gray that morning, Maria found a place behind the barricade. As she looked up to the fifth floor window, she remembered the good days she had spent there, the family movie nights and the excitement of that one boy calling her. She smirked almost imperceptibly with knowing as she recalled the cracks in the walls, too. She had barely noticed them before, but they are why she was here today. As the memories ran through her head, she savored every one for what seemed like hours. It was the explosions which brought her out of her reverie. As her eyes refocused on the home that had been, she had to fight back tears as the sudden waves of loss rolled over her like the clouds of dust billowing towards her. She was not prepared for this to carry the weight it did.

I often return to my memories from times long past and reflect on what they say about who I was at the time, or at least who I thought I was. After all, the first time I lived them I was too wrapped up in actually living them to really understand them. There were the hard times which were endured while hoping for the good times. The good times were lived trying to lock them into memory, usually with mixed success. Good times or bad, though, each lived moment leaves in its wake something. When I first read Ortega y Gasset say “I am I and my circumstance”, it made immediate sense, though full understanding will require more reading. Those memories, both the good and the bad, are more than just memories. They are an inseparable part of who I am. He goes on to say “and if I don’t save [my circumstance], I don’t save myself.” The unexpected weight of loss and devastation becomes part of who we are, and we must work to recover from it or we will not. When realization dawned on me that my life had changed in a fundamental way, I was not prepared to carry the weight of it. It has taken a long time to grieve and arrive at this point, but all of that loss is part of what makes me who I am. What is left for me now, as Ortega says, is to save my circumstance and by so doing save myself.

The summer before my freshman year in high school, walking home from football camp, an older player from camp saw me, pulled up beside me, and offered me a ride home. I was grateful since it was a hot midwest summer day and I had another two miles to walk, so I happily hopped in. As he pulled away, he asked me what church I went to. It wasn’t that uncommon to be asked that, after all, he had picked me up right in front of a large church with another across the street, so I told him thinking nothing of it. He followed that up by asking me if I liked it. I was not prepared for that. I don’t know why not. It made me hesitate. That split-second hesitation prompted a cascade of thoughts, mostly centered around why I hadn’t just automatically said “yes.” Interspersed in that deluge of thought was a growing awareness that hesitation itself can become an answer. It was just a momentary lapse from which I recovered, but part of me hesitated to speak the lie.

A handful of years later, I was lying in my bed contemplative after finishing Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I had asked my parents to mail me a copy because I couldn’t shake the unhappiness that I was feeling. It just wasn’t making sense that I was doing everything I had been promised would make me happy, and yet I wasn’t. I remember lying in my bunk in Chiguayante, just east of Concepción, wondering how Frankl’s story applied to my life. He told me that it was possible to find meaning even in the midst of the most horrific circumstances. He was proof; he had found meaning in the midst of a Nazi concentration camp, and my circumstances were nowhere near as horrific as that. I remember feeling that what I had just read was very important. It also felt as though it applied to others, but not to me.

That reading of Frankl, during my time in Chile, put me on a path that I was unequipped to appreciate until much later. It provided me just the barest outline for how I could construct meaning and make sense of life. I think he spoke to that part of me which had hesitated rather than lie on that summer afternoon walking home from football camp just a handful of years earlier. Certainly, that memory doesn’t define my life. It was a single note in the background noise. A note that stood out just a tiny bit from the cacophony of the other notes in my life. Looking back now, after the heartbreak and loss, I see it as something very different. I choose to reframe that memory, not as the personal failure I had taken it for, but as something I can drive through the rubble left in the wake of the demolition of the framework of my life. A foundational pillar that I can drive until it hits something solid and which I can begin to build upon in my own search for meaning.