Practicing Powerlessness

Wednesday afternoon, my boys came back from their dads. I emerged from my almost-17-year-old’s bedroom to find two towering young men with Nerf guns in my living room. Their fingers moved up to their smiling lips and I registered delight in their eyes. My heart leaped and I let out a small shriek the same time I spotted my 13-year-old doubled over laughing at the open back door.

I rapidly pieced together what was happening just as my son emerged from his room, yelled in surprise and took an orange Nerf dart in the shoulder from one of his triumphant friends. “The poor guy was ambushed,” I thought. “Like a sitting duck.”

Nerf wars. My son and others in his eleventh grade class had set up this highly strategic, high-stakes (in the currency of gift cards) game to fill the time that normally consisted of classrooms, sports, and hangouts at local eateries. Social distancing is a tough one for teenagers.

Yet I know they too are grappling with a feeling of powerlessness as their school year and lives are cancelled, bit by bit. They digest the news that, in all likelihood, last Friday was their last day of school. That there will be no sports (not even practice), no prom, no college tours, no trips to Mexico to build houses during Spring Break, no professional sports to watch, no yearbooks and probably no graduation.

In this disorienting reality, I know they are watching me to see what I make of it. My administrator calls and tells me I have a two-hour window of time to collect my personal items and everything my students would need in the way of assignments for the rest of the year. I take in the news with slow, deep breaths and head to my classroom with my seven-year-old to pack the rest of the school year in a box.

I draw on my experience with powerlessness–we actually know one another quite well. My boys are also familiar with the feeling, whether or not they’ve labeled it as such. Since both their mom and dad have struggled with addiction, they know all too well the reality of having to watch and wait and be able to do nothing about it. Like seeing a car crash in slow motion…

The truth is, we are all powerless. Author Jack Kornfield writes, “Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control.” The irony of the situation is not lost on me; that a country like America, who prides itself on being powerful and individualistic, has been brought to its knees by a microscopic virus.

However, people who have battled with addiction and are in recovery have an intimate knowledge of powerlessness, along with the art of surrender. Of the feeling that something beyond our control has taken the wheel. We have practiced powerlessness and come to terms with it. We have accepted it and are willing to make the best of it because, after all, what’s the alternative?

In the face of powerlessness, the one thing we can do is choose our attitudes and how we respond to our circumstances. Sometimes, I let my mind play out the what-if scenario of me drinking again, or worse, if I had never stopped. I let my mind absorb the ugliness and despair that would accompany that reality and I gratefully choose, each day, a life that does not include booze.

We as a society are watching one another and how we are responding to our circumstances, collectively and as individuals. We see people acting out in fear, or anger, or courage, or love. Powerlessness can bring out the worst in a person. But if we practice it and grapple with it and accept it on a daily basis, we are much more likely to choose love, grace and patience.

That is what I hope to show my children. To show them that they too have the opportunity to practice powerlessness and let it mold them into better people. People who have accepted the fact that we are not in control, but, as blogger Ash Alves wrote, “we are loved and protected by a source beyond ourselves.”

With that acceptance comes trust in the fact that it’s all going to be okay, and that this too, shall pass.