The Waterslide

(What follows is a chapter from a book titled Living In A Time of Dying: Cries of Grief, Rage, Love, and Hope, co-authored by myself and William Douglas Horden. Publication TBA.)

I want to tell you a story. A story about a trip down a waterslide.

It was mid-August 2018, what seems an eternity ago, back when we could still take so many things for granted. The world is a very different place now as I write this amidst a global pandemic.

It was my friend Shockie’s 34th birthday. I met Shockie and her wife, Bombshell, through roller derby, and hence we always refer to each other by our “derby names.” For her birthday Shockie had invited a group of us — myself, Scratch, Scratch’s girlfriend Eileen, Tricki, Ziggy, and of course Bombshell — to rent tubes and go floating down a nearby river. I tend not to be someone who “does things,” per se. I’m more of a homebody — which is just another way of saying that I’m straight-up boring, which is the truth — but I had recently made up my mind to make more of an effort to nurture my friendships, especially with good, wholesome, creative, fun, and sincere people like the Shock’s (as we called them), and I wanted to support and celebrate my friend on her birthday. So, with images of basking belly-up in the open sunshine, the cool fresh water tickling our toes, and with perhaps a drink in hand, I anticipated a pleasant afternoon in good company.

Then, on the morning of our special birthday outing the skies opened up with a deluge of rain and the threat of lightening which dashed our lazy dreams. I was sincerely disappointed, and we tried to brainstorm alternative ideas for possible indoor shenanigans. That’s when Shockie (to my utmost chagrin) elected that we should all go to the nearby indoor water park. (Yikes, I thought. I mean, WHAT FUN!)

Now, normally I wouldn’t be caught dead at a waterpark, indoor or otherwise. The very thought of it sets me on edge — all those people gathered in close proximity, everything damp, the pungent acrid smell of chlorine hanging in the air and slimy wet children screaming and running all over the place. No, thank you. But I wanted to make the effort to play nicely with others, make friends, and not be a spoilsport, so I set my trepidations aside, grabbed my bathing suit, and hopped in the car.

It was more or less exactly (as bad) as I had imagined. Entering the park was like running smack into a wall of hot, moist, sticky, vaporized chlorine. My lungs protested and my heart began to pound in panic as I gulped for fresh air (in vain). I tried to remind myself that if no one else was suffocating in here then neither would I and to just calm down and relax. (What fun!).

The high glass walls echoed with the shrieks of children, running amok from pool to pool, their wet feet slapping on the warm, glistening concrete. I surveyed the chaos dubiously, perhaps as Dante might some circle of hell. There were various different pools and features — a small kiddie pool where grandparents and new moms sat with their young toddlers splashing innocuously; a large wave pool with a simulated waterfall feature where children and adults in innertubes rocked languidly on the puny waves; a pool with low basketball hoops; a large faux-tropical wooden structure that would periodically dump a load of water on the gaggles of children climbing and playing on its scaffolding (I made a mental note to steer clear of that area); and several waterslides of different colors, a dinky light blue one, labeled “Category 1,” that was clearly for babies, and two larger twisty slides, yellow and red — Categories 2 and 3, respectively — for the bigger kids.

My group of middle-aged friends and I found a table where we could park our towels and bags before changing into our bathing suits and courageously — if a bit self-consciously, for our age — entered the fray.

The wave-pool was pleasant enough — disconcertingly lukewarm, and tame — but crowded and, quite frankly, boring. Before long one of my friends suggested we pick things up a bit by trying the slides and we all eagerly acquiesced, tramping over to the stairs leading up to the entrance to the twisty tubes. Upon reaching the first landing, however, I noticed a sign tacked next to the red and yellow slides that read, “only those under 120lbs allowed,” and I realized with slight chagrin that these slides were strictly for children and that I had not fit into this particular category for quite some time. It was at this point that it began to dawn on me that perhaps I was getting myself into more than I had bargained for.

But there was no turning back now. This is what one does at an indoor waterpark and I was trying to be a team player and go with the flow — to turn back now would have been just so lame and boring, and too typical of an old me, a more anxious and inhibited me. So on up I went, dutifully plodding after my friends, a grown-ass woman scared to go down a silly waterslide, but even more scared to admit that she was faking it, desperately, this act of free-wheeling confidence. (…What fun…)

At the top of the staircase we arrived at a platform with two large holes in the wall, one colored dark green and large enough around to fit an adult human, and one orange and slightly larger to accommodate an innertube. These were labeled Category 4 and 5, respectively. The slides that I had anticipated riding were the ones for children whose twists and turns I could see and appraise for myself. But alas, those were not for me. These slides went outside the building, their contortions a mystery, before depositing their riders back inside the park into a pool two-stories below.

Standing between these two gaping holes stood the obligatory bored teenager, half-heartedly monitoring the slide-goers as they, one by one, got into position at the mouths of these menacing maws before disappearing with echoes of hooting glee into the unseen bowels.

Holding in mind the corresponding categories assigned to hurricanes, and given that I did not have an innertube, I chose the line for the lower and less ominously categorized green slide. Scratchy, Eileen, Bombshell, and Tricki had all carried innertubes with them, so they dispatched to the Category 5, while I queued up behind Shockie and Ziggy.

Shockie disappeared first with a howl, arms flown above her head in wild abandon.

Ziggy followed without trepidation in a perhaps more sensible corpse pose, arms crossed tightly over her chest.

Now I was the last one left standing on the platform and, without thinking too much about what I was about to do, slid my legs into that hollow maw. My hands gripped the edges of the wet plastic as I waited for the indifferent teenager to give me the go-ahead. But he was distracted by a group of kids clamoring on inner tubes next to me, eager to push off into the exhilarating plunge.

What if I went to soon? Would I run into Ziggy in the middle of the tube? Or come splashing out on top of her at the bottom? But surely it’s been long enough, I thought. If I waited any longer I might lose my nerve! And with that thought I steeled myself and took my hands away from the edges of the tube, leaned back, scooching my butt further down the slippery plastic, and began to slide irreversibly forward.

Inside the tube was pitch black, the dark green plastic emitting absolutely no light. I stared blankly into the darkness as I plunged with increasing speed, the only sensation the cool slippery water at my back, lubricating my descent, and the bump, bump, bump of the junction seams of the hard plastic sections of tube rhythmically knocking against the back of my head as I went, progressively faster and faster, turning this way and now jerking that way. It didn’t take long — a few seconds at most — for me to realize that I had made a horrible mistake, as my body was whipped from side to side, and then upside down in a loop-dee-loop, losing all sense of direction and spatial relation. I was twisting, spinning, shooting through sheer darkness with nothing but my breath to rely on.

“Just breathe,” I reminded myself. I tried to take deep steady breaths through my nose, despite the jerking and jostling — my mouth, jaw, and eyes all clamped shut, every muscle in my body taut with fear. The air entering and exiting my lungs was my only comfort and I leaned into it as a lifeline. “As long as you’re breathing,” I thought, “you know you’re not dying,” as my stomach lurched around another curve, through another upside-down loop, my limbs lost for a sense of gravity, for anything to grab hold of.

There was no stopping this. And no telling how long this groundless chaos would last. Rationally I knew it couldn’t go on forever, but still, in the heart of the uncontrollable twisting darkness, a deeply subliminal part of me still wondered: “what if this is forever?” And in that moment it might as well have been. In such a moment of terror and utter helplessness it almost doesn’t matter that or if or when it might end. Because all that matters in that moment is that what is happening cannot be stopped.

And in that moment, which stretches on for what might as well be an eternity, when I realized with gut-wrenching terror that the solid ground which I had always taken for granted was no longer there beneath my feet, I found a kind of secret doorway, a threshold, within myself. On the one side was the terror of this seemingly endless descent, this unraveling of everything I thought was stable and dependable about the world, and which crushed my chest in an icy panic; and on the other side was, perhaps paradoxically, a kind of freedom.

Between these two sides, I found, swings a door bearing that much maligned term: “Acceptance.” Or maybe it’s “Surrender,” which isn’t any better, with its connotations of powerlessness in defeat. We like to think that we are in control — of our minds, of our bodies, of our lives (and perhaps even of those of others) — such that to accept or surrender is to admit our submission and our powerlessness in the face of reality — of what, simply, is.

“But no! I must be free!” we exclaim. “I must be able to choose that which befalls me, my fate, my destiny!” And yet, here I am, half-naked shooting every-which-way through a pitch-dark tube with no recourse to stop it or choose any alternative to the current situation. (What fun.)

I felt the panic rise up in my chest like bile — “wait,” I thought, “is it bile? No, it’s definitely panic. (Oh thank god it’s just panic!)” — as I clenched my entire body against this inescapable ordeal. “Just breathe,” I reminded myself again.

And there it was again, that door! With each steady, measured breath — as I careen through this twisting netherworld — the door swings open and I glimpse what is there on the other side of this infernal ordeal. With each breath I can feel myself coming back to myself. Despite the panic I must not run away, must not abandon myself in this, my hour of need.

No, the running, the resistance to the terror itself only serves to feed the terror. My desire — no matter how true, no matter how justified, no matter how righteous — to make it stop, to rewind, to go back to the top, to the beginning, and make a different choice — in other words my insistence on control, on exercising my free will, dammit! — is the very torment of my current circumstance. And it will not have its way (except with me) so long as I feed it my fear.

Oh, the irony that my grasping for ultimate freedom should become instead this torment of fate, tossing me about like a ragdoll in the jaws of a Rottweiler, a turmoil of my own making to rival that of the tube! The irony that my need for freedom from my circumstance should hold me captive to it, while freedom should be found in the surrender to my fate, to what I cannot control.

But for the breath, that familiar touchstone, swinging wide the door of surrender and acceptance to the truth and totality of the moment, I might have lost myself to the panic of that swirling vortex, whether of my own mind or the tube I can hardly tell.

And then there it was, a light! The literal light at the end of the tunnel came rushing towards, engulfed me and, before I knew it, I shot out of the end of the tunnel and was instantly submerged. Blinking blearily through the stinging chlorine haze I could see nothing but bubbles and froth all around me. For one terrible moment I had no idea which way was up and frantically reminded myself that I don’t have to know, I only have to hold my breath until I float to the surface.

I came up sputtering and shaking. The first thing I saw was Shockie’s face beaming back at me with the ecstatic, stricken look of one who has just survived rites, a kind of baptism by fire, or water, as it were. I swam clumsily towards her, as one scrabbles towards a port in a storm. Land, ho! The world had righted itself once more — I could tell up from down, I hadn’t died, and soon I had my feet firmly back on solid concrete. I shakily hauled myself out of the pool and, on adrenaline-induced Bambi legs, tottered back to our table where I slumped gratefully into a chair and, still breathing heavily, took stock of what I’d just experienced.

* * *

I immediately recognized my trip down the waterslide as an almost religious awakening, or at the very least a profound metaphor for the uncontrollability of life…and death.

We are all on the waterslide. We are all in this erratic unpredictable, sometimes tortuous (and torturous), often serpentine conveyance called Life. We all suffer our own personal waterslides when our lives are turned upside down — the loss of a loved one, an illness, or other crisis of the soul; and we also struggle through collective waterslides — poverty and economic inequality, the rise of anti-democratic fascism and extremist factions, the fear of social and ecological collapse, and pandemics as well. I think most would agree that at this moment in history (which certainly goes beyond even the writing of this in 2020), it often seems that the tunnel is getting darker, the pace swifter, the turns sharper. We are continually wrenched by whiplash from one seeming catastrophe to the next — from one political corruption scandal to the next, from one police murder to the next, from one natural disaster to the next, from one more calamitous study on the effects of climate change to the next, from one social uprising to the next — without time for our hearts to mend, or our minds to get a grips and regain our equilibrium.

For many of those of us in the United States, we perhaps first felt this slippery slope on the morning of November 9th, 2016, when we woke up to fact that not only did a large faction of our populace willfully support forces of vocal white supremacist fascism, but that the very democratic process and ideal of majority rule, which is the foundation of our government, has been woefully corrupted. Since that day we in the U.S. have watched as blatant white supremacists and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis have marched through our city streets; as voting in predominantly urban, Black, democratic, and low-income communities has been significantly restricted; as environmental protections have been tossed aside in favor of wanton exploitation of natural resources for corporate profit; as the rich have been allowed to grow exponentially richer to a level unprecedented in history and so obscene it is literally inconceivable to the human intellect; as the majority of citizens, who struggle to maintain even the most basic standard of existence (I will not deign to call it “living”) are pushed ever closer to, and often passed, the brink of bankruptcy and houselessness; as Black, indigenous, and peoples of color continue to be wantonly and unceremoniously gunned down, suffocated, and enslaved — yes, enslaved, according to the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution — by the foot soldiers of our own government; as South and Central American refugees are illegally imprisoned and tortured; as suicide rates continue to rise across demographics of age, race, and gender; as we battle compounding epidemics of income inequality, health care disparities, and opioid addiction; and now, as a global pandemic has been let run rampant through our country, largely unchecked, causing the worst infection and death rates in the world, and only exacerbating and rendering bare the systemic injustices that already plagued this supposedly great nation.

To be fair, these realities are not necessarily a direct result of the outcome of the 2016 presidential election — most of them, with the exception of the Covid-19 pandemic, have existed to varying degrees, often under a shroud of secrecy and/or willful denial, for centuries. Certainly, the forty-fifth president of the United States did not invent the systems of imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy — which have existed since well before the founding of this country and are embedded in its history and political apparatus’. But the consequences of these systems of injustice have all grown demonstrably worse over the past several decades — concurrent with the neoliberal stronghold of Congress, the presidency, and the federal policies — and have either gotten exponentially worse in the last several years or have failed to be mitigated in any substantive way. The result, or perhaps the intent, of all this — rendered particularly acute by the willful inaction of the U.S. government response to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis — seems to be a rather bald-faced objective by those elites in power to simply let “the masses” die or kill each other off, whether by illness and disease, poverty, or violent factionalism along racial and political lines. Meanwhile the wealth and resources needed to survive in this “civilization” continue to be amassed by a privileged few.

This is, of course, nothing but a fool’s paradise, as there will be no survival on a dead planet, and true wealth has always been measured not in hoarded resources but in robust relationships of community solidarity. The joke’s on them…I guess.

But thus far I have focused on the story of the United States, though many of the themes elucidated above run rampant through many if not most countries, as well as the corporate stronghold on business and industry world-wide. The more recent descent of U.S. politics and society into an experience of near-apocalyptic loss of normalcy and control has been jarring to many (particularly white, middle-class or affluent) Americans, but many peoples the world over have already been experiencing these crises for a long time yet.

Across the globe the vast majority of the world’s population has been kept in extreme poverty, left vulnerable to disease, starvation, and various forms of modern slavery. Many have been forced to flee their homes, their lands, or their countries, due to the ramifications of the often compounding forces of colonialism, dictatorial fascism, civil and international wars, and climate disruption. These people have already lost or been forced to leave behind any semblance of normalcy, comfort, familiarity, or control over their circumstances, instead taking the risk of finding new communities, new opportunity, and new life in foreign countries amongst strangers in unfamiliar cultures. Those who do often face virulent racism, ostracism, and violence in their new homes, while those who don’t end up foundering in barely survivable, inhumane refugee camps — that is, of course, if they survive the migrant passage at all.

Each of these stories is a trauma. We feel ourselves — and our world — slipping, losing our grip on the familiar, on what once seemed stable and constant, predictable, controllable. We find ourselves collectively falling, plummeting to an unknown end by some unknown and rapidly changing trajectory. We are all on this waterslide, together, with no indication of how or when it will end.

* * *

The waterslide, this experience of a dark plummeting groundlessness, is what some might call fate. It is what is, that which we, puny humans, have no recourse to stop or change. The terror induced by such an experience grips us at our very core and sends us into psychic spasms of panic and resistance. We clamor for some relief, some exit, any way to be free of the torment of living in such a violent and unjust world.

In our struggle to get away from this reality, from the simple, inescapable totality of what is, we often end up carelessly abandoning ourselves — furiously repressing or contemptuously turning away from our own sensitive hearts stricken with terror, grief, and rage — as we rail against our own impotence in the face of untenable circumstances. We feel utterly powerless, trapped, like a wounded animal, a hopeless victim of a cruel world.

And yes, perhaps there is some truth in this. No one of us has the power to change any of the litany of injustices and abuses that we encounter in this world, or in life in general, much less that ultimate injustice — the fact that all things die, that every sacred event, every unique being, every novel creation of the universe, will inevitably be irrevocably lost.

This is, of course, the ultimate symbolic significance of the waterslide as an allegory for the uncontrollable inevitability of death, of the loss of that which cannot be replaced. Which is also what perpetually breaks our hearts and inflames our senses with rage when we witness lives and Life so recklessly, callously, and casually treated as expendable. It is unconscionable. And yet, here we are, naked and afraid, plunging through this wretched nightmare with no recourse to stop it. (And no, it is no fucking fun.)

It is true, we cannot resist the often cruel hand of fate, and doing so often risks doing more harm than good, as we thrash against our constraints. In truth it is that very resistance to circumstance, to what is in any given moment, that exacerbates our torment into a frenzy of panic and powerlessness — it is the desire, the need, to make it stop that turns the ride of Life into some sort of torture device, and thereby confirms our victimhood; or, in other words, “seals our fate.”

And from this position, from this perspective, we are powerless. But that is not the only truth. Because we always have within us the freedom to choose how we respond to circumstances, to fate, to the world, and Life, as it is. But such a choice is never a done-deal, because it must be constantly made afresh in each new and ever-changing moment. Such choice, such freedom, requires one bring a core of and commitment to integrity (which is the very opposite of compulsion) as well as conscientious self-awareness to every thought and action.

And it requires that one accept and surrender to what is, to fate. Resistance breeds resistance; war breeds war. Acceptance and integrity allow for action imbued with sincere intention, rather than simply rote or compulsive reaction. Moreover, surrender is an act of faith. It is not only an acknowledgment but a co-creative conception of (and with) the divine in everything. In surrender we not only find ourselves held in the sacred embrace of divinity, but we are responsible for embodying and manifesting that divinity as immanent to the living world.

This is crucial. It is a vital and reciprocal, co-creative, collaborative way of re-ensouling an enchanted world and cosmos, as well as of envisioning a new mode of existence on this planet. In truth, our cosmos has always been and remains immanently enchanted — as ancient and indigenous wisdom traditions teach us — but it has become dis-enchanted within the dualistic materialism of the modern Western, imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal worldview.

We cannot continue doing things the old way, the way that has sought to divide and conquer, exploit and exterminate, leaving us broken, broken-hearted, and enraged. We cannot dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools. We must envision and have the courage to respond in radically new ways to the crises we face.

Instead of grasping for equilibrium in a broken system and world, we must have the courage to stay in disequilibrium, to let ourselves fall and perhaps fall apart, to embrace the collapse of all we knew and relied upon before, and instead lean into the faith that there is something more than this, something bigger than us puny humans with our catalogue of mistakes, and possibly even something greater to come.

This is not to say that the fear, pain, and loss that come with the fall are not real, are not devastating, are not significant. They are. And what — or who — may be lost in the process is inviolably imbued with immeasurable worth, and thus cannot be replaced. Rather than resist the inevitability of such losses, rather than deny or ignore, repress or evade the agonizing reality of suffering, uncertainty, and, yes, even death, there is always the possibility of not just finding but creating another doorway, another way of relating — from our own sensitive hearts ringing with love, courage, and hope — to this thing called Life.

And then, when the light at the end of the tunnel finally comes, we will not come sputtering up from the depths only to find more of the same — it will not be the violent, broken world we left behind. We will instead have created a portal and crossed a threshold into a new world and a new way of living in it — with ourselves and with one another — which is no longer predicated on fear, division and competition, scarcity and exploitation, violence and cruelty, but on integrity and faith, trust and solidarity, compassion, forgiveness, and Belonging.

We will still — always — be on the waterslide, but no longer will we feel powerless to fate; rather, we will know not only our own resilience and capacity for acceptance and surrender in the face of circumstances outside our control, but we will also be able to find joy in the exhilaration of the ride.