The Shrinking Parameter

"I've been anxious lately," he told me last night as we sat for a moment drinking a beer. It was a statement of fact, I thought, and didn't require the rendering of opinion on the matter. So, of course, he continued.

"I think I'm going to get the sack at work."

At which point, I thought it only polite to inquire. "Why?"

"My boss doesn't like me. She's an idiot, and I think I've made a point of helping her show that too often. She's turned mean, now. She keeps making my job harder and harder so that I really can't do it any longer. She is going to make it look like a failing in me."

"Well, that's a bit of tyranny, isn't it?"

"Exactly! She is a tyrant. She swaggers like a tyrant. She smirks like a tyrant. I hate her. I really do."

"That's not healthy," I said, immediately embarrassed of sounding like a television analyst. "Do you think she hates you?"

"Yes, yes, absolutely," he said emphatically. "She hates me awfully."

"Well, what can you do about it?"

"I don't know," he replied despondently, shaking his head back and forth to himself. "I've got to do something."

But that's the story of the world, isn't it? Power and conflict, conflict and power. There are lots of people who have it worse than he does, of course, but it wasn't going to do him any good for me to say that. Oppression is oppression. We all feel bound by something outside ourselves. Our minds get small and we think inside shrinking parameters. Hold on, we think. Hold on.

I've been back to work a single day, now, and my mind is getting smaller, too. I have to do many things I don't want to do today, things that are worse than merely wasting time. But like my friend, I'm too afraid to let go.

I've been enamored of the book "Solo Faces" by James Salter for a very long time. On the surface, it is a book about rock climbing, and the final words of the novel are, appropriately, "Hold on," though the words there are used only metaphorically. A close friend, a boy whose marriage I officiated in Yosemite two years ago outside a beautiful old church surrounded by wilderness and mountains, and with whom I've climbed mountains and rock faces more often than with anyone else, quotes that passage to me all the time. There is a certain profundity to it, of course, in the right context. But today, I'm thinking in a different way. I think I will tell myself the opposite thing as I sit through the soul-killing events that I must endure.

"Let go," I will tell myself. "Let go."