The Arrows
A lot of my memories as a little girl are of escaping. I don’t know how it started or why. At one point I was asleep and the next, I was awake in darkness, my bed facing a window I was sure someone was going to break, climb through, and kidnap me? Hurt me? Hurt me and then hurt my family? Did I really believe all of these things at the ripe old age of five?
My heart pounding, the voices in my head chaotic, frantic. It was only a matter of time before this inevitable doom was headed my way, and so I did the most logical thing I could think of, I ran to safety. My mom. I woke her from sleep, crawled in between her and my dad, and felt the thumping of my heart start to slow down. Whatever threat I’d felt alone in my own room, didn’t exist here. This became a pattern over the next few years. Me running, running, running, my own unreasonable, illogical fear chasing me down the halls — a midnight race, me against everything I couldn’t control, everything that was promised to me and could be taken away at any moment. I wanted to escape this most uncomfortable feeling. I didn’t know how to soothe myself, how to talk myself down from the ledge, my whole body would flood with adrenaline and all I knew was I needed to get the hell out of there.
But what was worse than the anxiety was the shame, the feeling like there was something fundamentally wrong with me, like I was a burden, the fear that by doing this over and over again I would push away the people who loved me most.
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In one of his parables The Buddah explains:
“In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. And with this second arrow comes the possibility of choice.”
Did you hear that?
OK, write it down somewhere because, holy shit, this is everything.
This idea of the arrows has saved me over and over and over again, and it definitely comes in handy now that I’m a mom and a caregiver for a husband with a traumatic brain injury.
The short version goes like this:
Life can be hard, and there are messy things you will experience because that is a part of being human so just be kind to yourself, OK?
But let’s dive a little deeper. Tara Brach, one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, writes:
“The first arrow is the natural experience that arises in this human animal that we are, for example: fear, aggression, greed, craving. The second arrow is self-aversion for the fact of the first arrow. The first arrow arises from causes and conditions beyond our control. But when we learn to release the judgment and self-blame that we experience in response to the first arrow, the second arrow becomes completely avoidable.”
There are things in this life that are simply out of our hands like genetics, culture, what experiences we had as a child, but also the things that pierce us unexpectedly — death, illness, broken hearts. These things wound us, but ultimately what I’ve found to be true, and what The Buddah was trying to tell us so long ago, is that our reactions and our stories about the first arrow, are what create the second arrow, and then the third, fourth, and fifth arrows too.
According to Brach the second arrow is about self-blame and judgment, and how I’ve come to interpret this is in my own life is that additional arrows mean any kind of mental violence we impose on ourselves. It can be shame, comparing yourself to others, resisting the experience itself. Stories like:
This kind of shit always happens to me.
This isn’t how my life “should” look.
I’m broken.
Everyone else has got things figured out but me.
For some reason, whether it was genetics, or the intergenerational trauma of my mom’s own escape from her homeland before I was born, I was a child with anxiety. I couldn’t control it. I can’t control that when I was three months pregnant my husband was hit by a car and sustained a severe traumatic brain injury. And none of us can control the fact that today the Coronavirus exists and is killing people, other than doing our part in keeping good hygiene and practicing social distancing.
In life there will be a thousand first arrows, I promise you, but it’s the second and third and fourth arrows we can focus on.
Right now, in this moment, are you judging yourself for not being as productive as before? Are you obsessively watching the news and allowing your anxiety to increase? Are you comparing your high stress quarantine life with those who are having dance parties every night? (I know I’m guilty of that one.)
These are all the arrows you can control.
I wish I could tell my five-year-old self about the arrows, that there’s no need to carry all the extra ones around and label herself as broken.
Be kind to yourself. Love the crap out of yourself, I’d tell her, one arrow is painful enough.
Read more about the arrows here:
http://blog.tarabrach.com/2017/08/the-wisdom-of-its-not-my-fault-finding.html