APRIL 2024 SULLYGRAM:  So sorry to hear you’re behind bars. Bummer. Wazzat, you’ve never been in jail? Really? Mercy, you’re the only one! The rest of the world isn’t so lucky. We all end up incarcerated, you know.

Maybe you just can’t see the bars. Some see them in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Some never see them, because the bars aren’t made of what they think bars are made of. That’s life’s big surprise. You think you’re free and in control, think you can manage how you think, how you feel, and how your choices will affect you. So, maybe you chug right along through the decades, telling yourself what’s important, what’s not, and nothing gets to you that much, even while the bars are forming.

There are lots of differences between us as to things and events, people and places, but for many the progression goes something like this. You survive life’s early angst about who you are, find your crowd, find your partner. With school behind you, life gets seriously practical. You join the rat race and scramble to make a living. Stability comes in baby steps, but you gradually get the hang of being an independent consumer as you climb the ladder. It’s a time to congratulate yourself for the spouse, the friends, the job, the car, maybe the house, or at least making the rent every month. DINKs – Double Income No Kids – for a while. But then a family. Parenting is nature’s way of paying you back for all the trouble you caused growing up. That might even be the first iron bar in your cell. Because the rules, values, mores – whatever you want to call them – that brought you to the dance have to be filtered through your kids now.

But you’re still able to slip around that one totally visible bar, no problemo. Despite mounting stresses, down deep you’re still in control of who you are. The job is a killer sometimes, bills keep adding up, responsibilities grow, freedoms ebb, kids don’t listen…life stalls. Maybe you and your spouse are even drifting apart. Maybe the next bar is a neon bar with laughs and the wistful echoes of youthful independence. So many demands, little set-backs. But you soldier along, still savvy about the prisons, the cells – the bars. There is collateral damage as you struggle to stay in the driver’s seat. Maybe you even split the marriage, complicating your life financially and emotionally. But you’re still in control. You see clearly who the enemy is. Money. You need money. And time. Time to heal relationships. And maybe taking your health for granted is creeping into the picture, though the alarms are mostly cosmetic – gray hairs, wrinkles, extra weight.

The years slip by, and a lot of what you worried about dies of attrition. You fought and won. Mostly. The money sustains you, relationships settle into truces, you become wiser and more philosophical. It’s a renaissance based on new values, new premises. Damn, you wish you could be young again and know what you know now! But at least there’s still time to get it right. Some of the luster has gone, but it was mostly gild anyway. You get that now. Maybe you always knew.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all blueprint, and every path is unique. But rich or poor, happy or sad, win or lose life’s superficial contests, we all come to this point. Maybe you’re aging gracefully (easier for a man than a woman), keeping up with the culture. Maybe you migrate a generation or two, like a gear meshing with new teeth further up the drive-train. Maybe your biggest problem is living up to an image of “success.” All in the game. You deal with it. 

And that’s when you start to find out.

The bars were never the obstacles to your goals and endeavors. They were the habits you cultivated to overcome the obstacles. The space between, to quote a Dave Matthews song. Your reflexes, your anxiety, your stress, blood pressure, headaches, depression…all revolve around a hub you couldn’t see before. They react to unsponsored stresses now, out of proportion with the size of problems. Those are the bars. Plastic once; hardened steel now. That’s your prison.

Is recognizing the source still half the battle? Too late for platitudes. The term “manage” comes into your vocabulary. Not control or cure but manage. Nothing saws through bars that are made of habits and reflexes. Nostrums, talking heads, doctors, shrinks, religion…if only you could go back to the beginning.

Hmmm. Why can’t you?

You still have the same two instruments that forged and tempered those bars. Thoughts & emotions. Maybe you don’t have the physical capacity at your call now, the energy, but you have knowledge, judgment. Do you have the will? Do not let declining physical life with its little insults shut you down. Let your mind inform your emotions this time, instead of the other way around. Let your cold, colorless logic be relentless against fears, guilts, feel-good compassions that become counter-productive in the long run. What is it they say, it takes seven repetitions to sell an ad? Reversing a lifetime of habits requires more than the Biblical admonition of seven times seventy. Maybe there is no number of re-enforcements that will restore your prerogatives, but progress is made by getting out of yourself, checking those feel-good impulses. As a wise philosopher once said to me, “don’t give until it hurts…give until it stops hurting.” Life takes place between the ears. Jailbreak!
 

Photos below.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan