Letting Go

Photo by Jeremy Pardoe

The night before last, I watched my mother fly.  Had she taken up skydiving, this might have been a liberating experience, but instead, she was sailing through the air en route to the pavement from the step upon which she had tripped.  I can not think of when I have felt so completely powerless.  As my mother flew, frozen in a seemingly eternal moment of horror, I couldn’t or didn’t (the question that will haunt me) throw myself in front of her in time.  Happily, I can report that she broke not a single bone.  She has stitches and swelling to show for the fall, but neither the broken hip she feared in flight nor the skull fracture I anticipated.  Nonetheless, I am haunted by the sense I could do/(did?) nothing in that instant she needed me most.

This morning MSNBC’s Morning Joe interviewed Pete Carroll, the football coach who recently left USC for the Seattle Seahawks.  I gather from Joe Scarborough’s questions that the coach left USC as they faced a crisis.  Thus, when he said that in order to “be a champion” you must always strive for control, I choked on my coffee.

Abandoning folks who rely on you is a form of control, but it fails to meet my litmus test for leadership.  In the days following my mother’s fall, I have reminded myself of the Navajo practice that 80% is perfect.  Anything closer would be an affront to the gods.  Thus, the Navajo always leave an error within their rugs, because although gorgeous, they are human – not godly – creations.

Coach Carroll has missed the point.  Belief in total control signals delusion.  You cannot have it – ask anyone on the gulf coast.  To strive for it, makes you not a champion, but a chump.

Carroll’s statements seemed particularly ironic given that Mika Brzezinski sat opposite him.  Her memoir, All Things at Once, narrates her revelation that total control is not only impossible, but dangerous.  Trying to control everything, she fell down the stairs with her baby in arms.  She – like so many of us who are mothers – learned the hard way that while you can be many things at one, you cannot do everything at once.  You have to cede control of something.  What we choose varies, but choose we must.

I assigned Mika’s book in a seminar on reading and writing biography and took the students to hear her speak.  The young women had trouble with the central thesis.  As Mika or I would have at their age.  However, I have had to make so many choices among what I could do at a given moment while continuing to be far more that I found Mika’s book – despite our very different choices – a tremendous comfort when I read it several short weeks before my fortieth birthday.

I still crave the control I know I cannot have, but recognizing the problem is supposed to be half the battle won.  My mother’s fall may have been part of the 20% forbidden us in our quests for perfection, but her bruises serve as an apt reminder that relaxing and giving over to gravity offers a better outcome than striking the cement in a stiff-armed stretch for power we will never possess.

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