We Cannot Jump Off Our Own Shadow

(Dealing With Crises, Midlife or Other)


At 7 AM, I’d report to my boss Tony Cordova and his cousin Modesto so we could get most of our work done in the cooler parts of the day.  Each summer they drove up from Texas, leaving their families behind and sending their money south to feed them.  They worked my Anglo butt pretty hard, I a willing idealist glad to give them the upper hand, knowing my time at hard labor was not, as theirs, a life sentence.  By 3:30, they piled into their Chevy Hardtop and I hit the showers for my evening job staffing the motel swimming pool until 9.  

And that’s when I developed a way of orienting myself to the sun.  I was a teenager, a guy who thought having a tan made me look good.  Working on the grounds gave me a farmer’s tan.  From a distance, when I put on my trunks for my pool job, you’d think I was wearing a tee shirt, my pale skin refused the sun all day.  So as soon as I’d arranged

the deck chairs, I’d take advantage of the hour before the after-work crowd came to the pool with an hour to me…in the sun.  I learned to look at my shadow and use it to orient the deck chair, turning it to parallel to that when I lie down on it, the sun would be full on my face, and on my pasty chest.

My shadow was my guide to the light.  I used it and turned from it.  Perhaps this poolside ritual set me up for Victor Frankl’s quote in Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning – that we cannot jump off our own shadow.  Don’t we eventually (including "midlife crises") get turned around by life circumstances, turned away from those things that warm us and give us light?  And don’t we find our view filled by the darkness that is our own shadow?

It was near the epiphany of Jesus, the coming of the Magi, when I read Frankl’s book.  I thought of those wise men, but not as they felt the light of the Christ on their faces and the warmth of hope on their chests.  I thought of them as they turned around, when they faced not their guiding star, but its shadow.  The skin on my chest remembers, even after the intervening 50 years, the cooling that occurred when I had to stand and get to work, greeting my after dinner customers, my time in the sun halted.  And my heart remembers times during those 50 years that I’ve been turned away from the light and promise of my guiding star, forced to face my…dark side.

What were the Magi thinking after the Epiphany?  We can’t read their epilogue, but we live it.  Carl Jung wrote generously of the idea of the shadow, and much of his value to us is in respecting – that is, looking again – at our shadow.  We cannot, as every child learns, jump off of it.  It is ours for life.  But we can learn the steps of the dance, the dance of emotional maturity and spiritual grace that invites us to know our shadow and guide it through life’s turns to our gradually emerging musical score.