Thoughts: Vulnerability

I just had a breast biopsy, and I was taken aback by how vulnerable it made me feel: Being face down, manipulated, squeezed, irradiated, and poked, meanwhile worried about the outcome—I was shocked into being shaky, stupid, and tired the rest of the day. I even forgot to put our grandson’s car seat in the car when I went to pick him up! The impact of this routine procedure got me thinking about how vulnerable we all are—particularly the children and grandchildren we care for. 

The realities of vulnerability strike people from all directions—through poor physical health, psychological illness or trauma, the failure of projects, loss of friends, deaths of loved ones, one’s own impending death…the list goes on. Like everyone, I’m vulnerable to suffering in all these ways—I’ve just been lucky enough that I haven’t had to endure such pain very often or very intensely. That’s probably why I got so surprised by the feelings. That, and the fact that it’s one thing to be vulnerable to suffering, as all of us are, and another to feelvulnerable. The breast biopsy popped my pretense of calm and (relative) invincibility. 

Most of us work to keep the terror of our own vulnerability at bay. We don’t think about it, or we practice mindfulness, or we exercise hard, or we build up a bulwark of wealth, or we pray…these attempts to reduce the emotional impact of vulnerability connect us to long roots in philosophical and religious thought and practice. Buddhists, Taoists, and Stoics are particularly focused on achieving calm in the face of vicissitudes. In the ideal, for these philosophies/religions/practices, one learns to be invulnerable—not invulnerable to bad stuff happening to you, because that’s not under your control—but to your [one’s own] own reactions: You learn to avoid suffering. 

Accept vulnerability?

As you can see from my fearful reaction to a standard medical procedure, I’m not that tough. Still, I’ve never been interested in avoiding suffering as a goal. Philosopher Todd May, in his book A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability, agrees. He says that he doesn’t really want to be invulnerable. Instead, he says, he—and, he thinks, most people—just want ways to (mostly) manage vulnerability and its attendant suffering.

May uses this contrast to make the point: The ancient Greek Stoics, believing that the universe was ordered rationally, worked to be invulnerable to suffering by recognizing that events, being rational, are as they should be. So when the philosopher Anaxagoras was told of his son’s death, he replied calmly, “’I always knew my son was mortal.’” In contrast, for most people whose children die, “…part of their existence will revolve around a wound that cannot scar over.” So the question is, would you rather go through life like Anaxagoras or like the wounded parent? The parent who suffers has attached strongly to their child, and experiences all the richness and pain of the attachment, while Anaxagoras has maintained calm detachment from his emotions—and from his son. May says he’ll take the attachment…and some ways to manage the pain. 

I agree. The goal of accepting vulnerability, rather than overcoming it, resonates with a theme in this blog, which is the theme of caring. Attachment to the world—to our children, grandchildren, other people, our projects, our dreams, all of nature—these are all forms of caring. And, in May’s words, “Caring…is a package deal. Either we care and expose ourselves to suffering, or we are serenely compassionate and do not.” 

Before the Buddhists, Taoists, Stoics, and others jump in to say, “Not true! We do care!,” just a couple more sentences about May’s point. In the idea of “accepting” vulnerability, he includes practices intended to manage emotions, especially around all the small irritations and passing difficulties we experience. He thinks that this is actually what most practitioners of the various philosophies/religions do—finding ways to stay connected andnot give in to vulnerability most of the time.

I don’t know whether May is right about “most people.” I hope some readers can comment on their own experiences with practice, with calming, with succumbing—whatever vulnerability has meant in your life. I do think I instinctively practice a version of accepting vulnerability. With the biopsy, for example, I refused to dwell on “what ifs,” as there was no point in worrying about something that might be a nothing. And I think that for many of us, passionate compassion for others is enormously important component of our moral lives (not for all—I know strict utilitarians who calculate the right thing to do rather than feel it).

Grandchildren are vulnerable

Whatever your own choice, there’s also the question of what your choice might mean for your grandchildren and your grandparenting. For me, I hope the shakiness, disorientation, and loss of control I experienced during the biopsy procedure will make me more fully attentive to how the grandchildren might experience vulnerability: Children and teens have way less protection from the world’s shocks than adults do—they don’t have the experience, the cognitive control, the control of situations in general to ward off or manage pain or suffering as well as adults can. Every feeling is more intense for them, and more impactful.

One grandson, for example, had a period in which even a small separation from a well-known caregiver (Mom, me, his regular preschool teacher) would have him curled on the floor, distraught. Thinking into how he might be feeling, a good description might be “profoundly vulnerable.” His rock was absent, he didn’t have control of when or how to get it back, and he didn’t know what to do without it. Another grandson rode off a bike path into a drainage ditch. He was physically unharmed, but the shock of going from a happy family bike ride to being shocked, wet, and afraid has him saying even weeks later, “I will never go on that trail again.” His world—his confidence in his own biking abilities, and the ability of his parents and grandparents to protect him—was at least temporarily shattered. 

I’ll stop here: For now, my point is simply to bring awareness to how profound these feelings of vulnerability can be. In a future post [now ready here], I’ll talk about how grandparents can help grandchildren manage the pain. 

PS. My biopsy was negative.

PPS. As always with these posts, I’m more interested in opening a discussion than in having the last word. What do you think about vulnerability, yours or your grandchildren’s?