A wise and beloved teacher in my life sometimes uses the word “gristle” to describe challenging concepts that take a while to sort out and clarify. She invites students to chew on them for a while: patiently, and with effort and enthusiasm.
Gristle is tough because it doesn’t break down during the cooking (or chewing) process. Tough but elastic, it’s a hardworking and essential component. Its job is to connect bones and muscles to each other.
For me in the metaphorical sense, chewing on gristly concepts leads to a choice: I can give up and spit them out, or I can swallow them whole.
Gulp! There’s no turning back. The gristle is now internalized, uncomfortably so, and without full understanding. Is that akin to trust? Technically, yes.
I do like the metaphor of gristle for my own experience and spiritual path, because nothing ever comes easy for me. I’ve grappled with that issue all my life. Poor me!
The grappling does seem to have some benefit, though. When big decision moments come along, I sometimes recognize that certain challenges from the past have been transformed into coping mechanisms. Then I can use those coping mechanisms to navigate the current challenge. The aforementioned wise and beloved teacher offers the perfect word for that as well: alchemy.
The turning point from gristle to gold can be a little bit fuzzy, and that’s fine. Transformation is ongoing, not an end in itself that is isolated from other things that are transforming. It’s a moving target. The older I get, the more I get that.
A few years ago, the world started spinning faster and an overall sense of anxiety and uncertainty took over. This brought on a desire for stability and an anxious search for stray elements of safety, groundedness and the ever-more-elusive “known” world.
The known world is no more, and many things have changed. But I’ve started to even out my constant seesawing between dread and relief, and I’ve cut down on analyzing why and how life’s circumstances, big and small, turned out differently than I thought. I now see the benefit of releasing myself from expectations. These expectations cover a very wide range, from the mundane to the momentous. Such as…
Mundane: If I don’t expect to find everything on my shopping list, I save myself from the volcano-like frustration that seems to bubble out from other shoppers in the grocery store, steering through the sea of pallets and boxes like Odysseus threading the needle between Scylla and Charibdis.
Momentous: I’ve been working on a manuscript for almost two years. I’m far enough along that it will eventually bear fruit, but last week a publisher rejected my proposal. My heart rose up in my throat before I opened the email. The physical sensation of “my world is about to change” is the same as with earlier big moments in my life. I can’t un-experience that. But the deflating sink of disappointment isn’t as long or painful as it used to be. That surprised me a little. Somehow, without knowing when or why, I’ve seen the benefit of releasing myself from expectation, and with practice, I’ve gotten better at it.
It really comes down to a release from “poor me.” We all suffer—past, present and future. I suffer, past, present and future. It’s useless to waste time comparing or setting arbitrary standards. Damn that gristle! Yet I must offer reluctant thanks for the way it serves me without my knowing it. That’s alchemy.
