We probably all know someone — or maybe we are that someone — who’s had the experience of “hitting bottom.” They’d reached a crisis point in their life that shook them to their core and they crumbled. The world as they knew it had fallen apart.
The first person I ever witnessed hit bottom was my father. He’d been in denial about his alcoholism for years, until one fateful evening he was confronted in a way that left no room for escape. It began with a fight over his drinking with his then teenage son (me). A butting of heads became a brief exchange of blows, and in my hurt and rage I knocked him down — though in truth that was only because he was drunk and had lost his footing. But it ended the battle, and if what happened next had not happened, it would’ve ended the entire confrontation as well, with a tacit agreement between us never to speak of it again.
But something else did happen. As my father lay on the floor, drunk and humiliated in front of me and my mother, the phone rang. It was his office. A perfectly timed call from a man my father had once mentored and who was now his boss. “Stop drinking or lose your job” was the gist of the message. That pushed my father over the edge. He hung up the phone, sank into our living room couch, buried his head in his hands, tears streaming down his face, and said over and over again “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”
And then, as is often the case when people hit bottom, my father figured out what to do. He got counseling. He joined AA. He stopped drinking. Having collapsed into a black hole of pain and grief and guilt and humiliation, he re-emerged on the other side a different person. Something had died, something better had been born.
Though we may not talk about them much, experiences like my father’s are common enough to be embedded in our collective awareness. We know that suffering can lead to a death and rebirth of sorts, that people often emerge from even the most painful experiences stronger, wiser, and more deeply alive than ever before. And knowing this, we can draw from it faith in our own capacity for change as we confront a world that in many ways seems to be hitting bottom itself.
The fact is, humans have not yet worked out how to have a healthy relationship with each other or the planet, and the feedback is getting too strong to ignore. Almost every institution we depend on is being strained to the breaking point.
Our political system, long corrupted by well-financed special interests, now appears vulnerable to an authoritarian take over.
Our economic system, sustained only by pillaging the world’s resources, is pushing the planet to the tipping point. Temperatures are rising as if trying to kill off an invasive bacteria; food supplies are threatened; forests and fresh water are disappearing; deserts are expanding; species are going extinct on a massive scale.
And most perversely of all, the trillions of dollars earned from squandering nature’s resources are disproportionately invested in yet another assault on people and planet: An out-of-control global war machine that threatens to destroy the species that created it.
Taking in the fullness of our predicament is of course overwhelming, but that is what it means to hit bottom. You’re in a deep fall, with no nets to catch you before you confront the reality you’ve most wanted to avoid. It’s the totality of the confrontation that gives the experience its transformative power.
After the fall, however, it’s a different story. There’s a chance to seize a different future based on new understanding and new insights. A chance to walk through newly opened doors that reveal to us a way forward, toward the world we most wanted in the first place.
Many people of course already know what at least one of those doors reveals: Well-being does not come from excessive materialism. Security does not come from the barrel of a gun. Both come from strong relationships. Both come from building community from the local to the global.
The gift of hitting bottom then, may be that as we emerge from that dark place, many more will have had that same insight. Enough of us, perhaps, to trigger an event analogous to the fall of the Berlin Wall, where that which artificially divides us comes crashing down and we deepen our mutual connection. So that rather than seeking power and advantage over one another, we simply seek the best for each other instead.
That at least is the possibility. It’s up to us to make it so.
Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend.
Kern