To overcome my fear of heights, in 1995 I went skydiving. The scariest part of that was the plane ride up and the anticipation of flinging myself out of an airplane 2000 feet in the air. The free fall was exhilarating, the landing rough. This experience did nothing to ease my fear of heights, I still can't bungee jump (something about trusting my life to a rubber-band)... To overcome my fear of water, I get in it. I put my face in the water when I shower, I even put the water around my face when I take a bath. I've even gone to local water parks and slid on the rides. The anxiety there is manageable.
But the fear of water never goes away.
Several years ago, Will and I went down to the Green River to go tubing ... Yes, we were tubing a river that people pay guides to take them down in boats. Not one of our wiser choices as adults, or rather, not one of MY wiser choices as an adult ... Will thinks it's great fun.
Despite my horrible, paralyzing fear of water (and my better judgement!), I wanted to overcome it and to be with Will and to enjoy this adrenalin rushing experience. Sometimes we're given fear for a really good reason... like to save our lives.
Parts of the river were so calm and serene that I actually found myself relaxing a bit and the knot in my stomach loosening. I was still incredibly tense and afraid of just letting my feet hang into the flowing water around me. We'd hit moments of rapids but nothing too terrifying, until I hit an eddy...
What's an eddy? Imagine a big boulder in mid channel. The river flows around it, right? But water piles up against the upstream side, too. That's the cushion. But don't count on it being a soft slam if you hit it hard, the cushion is stuffed with rock, after all!
And what happens downstream? The boulder splits the river into two parts, but the filaments of water are reunited almost immediately. Then, impelled by gravity, some of the flow surges back to fill the "hole" in the river. The result? An eddy.
Of course, no two eddies are exactly alike. If a river is lazy and slow-moving, its eddies will be equally languid, their ill-defined margins marked only by minute, almost imperceptible whirlpools. Such eddies are easy to drift into. This isn't the case when a river rushes pell-mell down a steep valley, though. Here the eddies take on a more muscular character. They're now maelstroms of sloshing spume, and their boundaries ("eddy-lines") form heaving barriers.
This is where my experience begins... an eddy.
After allowing myself to relax a bit and even for a moment or two smile, I got into a really white capped section of the river. Will yelled instructions at me from his tube, but I was too far away for him to grab onto and steer the right way. Once I got sucked into the fast flowing water, I was gone. Because I was so afraid I was fighting with the tube, the current and the water and I ultimately got removed from my tube.
I went right into the jaws of a very aggressive eddy.
I was terrified beyond words. I was under this loud, crushing amount water that was holding me under no matter how hard I fought. I couldn't hear Will, I couldn't hear anything but water. I could see the sky through the murky water so I knew I wasn't very far under so I kept fighting. While I fought for that one breath, I kept thinking "my kids, my kids, I cannot leave my kids".
After what seemed like hours fighting with destiny, I finally realized that there was no way out. I was going to die now and it was time to stop fighting.
The water stopped making a sound. It was silent all around me and I felt so alone. I felt like all of the strings that attached me to the whole world, that kept me on the ground, that kept me breathing and waking up in the mornings ... all those strings were suddenly cut and I was completely alone. I whispered my goodbye's to the kids in my mind, hugged them each one last time and whispered "I love you" to Will.
Then I stopped. I stopped trying to breathe, I stopped trying to swim. I just closed my eyes and stopped.
And the eddy let me go.
After coming to the conclusion last night that my Will is my perfectly square peg I felt all of the strings snap. I have felt for the last three years, but no more so than in the last 4 months, that I've been under rushing, crushing water. The noise is so loud I can't think, I can't process. The chaos is evident in my decisions and in my life all around me. I can see the sky, but it's murky and seems so far away although it's really only inches. It's time that I allow myself to "die". I have resigned myself to my divorce, resigned myself to being alone. This is the only way the eddy of despair and chaos will let me go. If I keep fighting against it all alone then I will stay right where I am and will eventually run out of fight. But if I just turn myself over to God, with my broken dreams and heart to mend, and then actually let go I will finally be set free.
As children bring their broken toys with tears for us to mend.
I bought my broken dreams to God because he was my friend.
But instead of leaving him in peace to work alone,
I stood around and tried to help with ways that were my own.
At last I cried, "How can you be so slow!"
He smile and said my child, "You never did let go."
-Anonymous
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