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08 July 2007
How to Save a Life.
'Where did I go wrong?/ I lost a friend/ somewhere along in the bitterness/
And I would have stayed up/ with you all night/ had I known how to save a life.'
- 'How to Save a Life,' The Fray.
I remember sitting in an auditorium, about a decade ago, listening to a pilot talk through the timeline of an aircraft accident that claimed the life of one of his friends. A horrible detached feeling, listening to the cockpit voice recorder, the mishap pilot's voice calm. He smoothly rolls inverted and pulls toward the earth, like he had done a thousand times. Halfway through the maneuver, he realizes something is wrong. The altimeter is spinning down too fast, and there's still too many degrees to pull through. At that point, the aircraft is already lost, but for about half a second the pilot has a chance to eject and save himself. Instead, he elects to perform a high-G recovery maneuver, which comes up a few hundred feet short. The tapes abruptly stop. The thought of it still makes my blood run cold.
I thank God that accidents in aviation are relatively rare, and I pray that neither my friends nor myself will ever experience one. Unfortunately, when they do happen, they often follow the story of that mishap pilot. By the time you realize something is wrong, it is too late to do anything about it. Your best choices all lie behind you on the timeline, and you can't go back and get them. The last-ditch maneuver does little good, because the aircraft's fate is already decided. Your last choice is the hardest one: abandon the aircraft and save yourself, or stay with the aircraft and lose both yourself and the aircraft.
Perhaps relationships between people are not so different. You want it to work, you are determined to learn how to make it work, you do everything you can to make it work. But the arguments keep getting louder, the insults sharper, the sleights greater. And at some point you can't ignore the flashing red lights. You finally allow yourself to realize that the aircraft is going to crash. But by then it is too late. It no longer matters who made it crash, or how, or why. Perhaps a week ago, or a month ago, you could have saved it. Perhaps not even then, but either way those choices are all in the past. It's going down, and you have to decide between a parachute and a last-ditch maneuver.
Regrettably, in relationships too there are many retellings of the same tragic story. I am most familiar with my own. I'll fast forward the tapes to the mishap sequence. The red lights had been flashing for a while. My friends, my family, telling me the same thing. She doesn't care about you. She's not your friend. The airplane's going down. Get out. I kept putting electrical tape over the warning lights. 'You just don't understand her.' Any of a hundred other excuses for the ways she treated me. Two months ago, there had been a real chance to save the friendship. We had always had problems with reciprocity in our friendship. I would always be the one to call, to write, to initiate everything. She would respond erratically, one time with the affection of a good friend, another time with the distance of a stranger. But at long last, we had a breakthrough. We had the best conversation that we had ever had, one where we at long last let down our defenses. Really, it had always been a shaky proposition, our attempted friendship. Too many wounds bound only by duct tape and Christian-ese platitudes, it had never really been airworthy. But after that conversation, I actually allowed myself to hope. Maybe we could sort this thing out. Maybe we really could be friends.
I won't attempt to claim that I was flying right. I don't think I really even knew then what I wanted out of the interaction. My head said one thing, my heart said another, and I wouldn't allow the two to sort it out. Opposite ailerons and rudders, I already set the aircraft up to spin. And then we lost an engine. She had promised that she would call, that she would set aside the time to sort this whole thing out. That we would face each other honorably, and say all the things that we knew all along and never said. That we would do this the right way, bury the bitterness of the past, end the miscommunication and mixed messages, and finally figure out how to be friends. So a week of waiting on her call turned into a month, which turned into two. Which turned into a realization that came far too late. 'If she was just a male friend, I would never put up with this.'
It's called 'strength of an idea.' When a pilot has an assumption deeply ingrained in their psyche, they tend to wrap the data around that assumption. Which can easily blind said pilot to what the data really should be telling them. 'I know its an engine problem.' So you read the gauges accordingly and shut down a perfectly good engine while hydraulic fluid is spraying all over the cabin. You make a bad situation worse. 'She is trustworthy. If she said she would do something, she will keep her word.' It was not open for revision. It should have been. (I have no doubt the plank in my own eye has hurt others in the same way, forgetting some promise made in haste, choosing to avoid some difficult confrontation.) So the mishap pilot fails to realize that she just doesn't care, that she has no intention of actually facing him. So he foolishly elects to stay with the aircraft. He decides to write her, clumsily telling her all the things he should have said a long time ago. The response was predictable. The mishap pilot starts a rivet-popping 10-g pull as the aircraft tries to turn the corner. He comes up short, as all hope of future interaction ends in the ensuing fireball, both saying words to each other that can never be taken back.
The temptation is to focus on the last-ditch maneuver. Maybe if I had done this, or that, it would have turned out differently. Perhaps. But probably not. Past a certain point, the mishap has already happened. With my once-friend, it had happened a month before-hand. Her promised call was the only hope of really saving the friendship. When she chose not to keep that promise, she had already decided the ending of the story. At that point, there were no good options left. If I call her as a friend, pretending nothing is wrong, then I tell her that I am okay with being walked on. I had done so too many times. Doing so once more in such extreme circumstances would write the pattern in stone, forever preventing a real friendship. If I call her to confront her, the already tenuous interaction will surely shatter into a million tiny pieces. As it did. In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. I'm not really sure why I believed that she would face me when things were hard, when she never faced me when things were easy. I'm not sure why I believed that a confrontation could solve what an invitation could not. The results were, I suppose, self-critiquing. There was, of course, a third option. Don't call. Recognize her choice not to keep her promise. Recognize the consequences of that choice. Recognize that she had already ended the friendship. The aircraft is going to crash. Don't be on board when it does. Had I the chance to do it again, I would have been reaching for the ejection handles.
Every pilot has a few close calls. The smart ones learn from them. The dumb ones get more close calls. Until they learn, they will continue to be a hazard to themselves and others. We all know people who end up in the same situation time and again, and it's always someone else's fault. A simple mathematical equation: if the same thing keeps happening with different people, they're the variable. You're the constant. There is a subtle form of the same mistake: the situational self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who can't quite stomach blaming the other outright generally end up blaming the situation. 'Every time I try to land in a crosswind, it turns out poorly. I shouldn't try to land in a crosswind.' Maybe that's because you're doing it wrong. Maybe, just maybe, a better answer is learning crosswind controls. 'Every time I get close to a girl, it always ends poorly. Maybe I have a vocation to singleness.' Perhaps instead he could put away his fear of commitment and intimacy, and it wouldn't always end poorly. 'I don't think that girls and guys can be friends after one has feelings for the other. When Harry Met Sally and all.' Perhaps the fact that the friendship doesn't work out has less to do with the attraction itself and more to do with her not being a friend in return. Her rule has been my exception, and I would not give up those friends for the world. I digress.
A relationship has two sets of controls. Both need to work in concert to keep it aloft. This is the tough part. There are times where one person will care more, be it pursuit, dispute or reconciliation. But you can't fly for them. At least not forever. If they are bound and determined to crash, whether through malice, ineptitude or apathy, at some point you have to let them do it. Intervene, confront, even intercede for a time, but you ultimately have to recognize their choice. Imagine the most extreme circumstance. A man cheats on his wife. He comes home each night unrepentant and unashamed. For all the world, she wants the marriage to work. She confronts him, she holds on, she does everything she can. He still comes home routinely reeking of another woman's perfume. At some point, she has to recognize his choice. He has chosen to wrong her. He made that choice knowing full well the consequences. She can no longer maintain both the relationship and her dignity. So she recognizes his right to be wrong, and gives him over to his adultery. He has wounded her horribly, yet ultimately she chooses to love him by recognizing his choice to do so, complete with consequences.
Pascal called it the Dignity of Causality. God loves us enough to allow our choices to matter. In a fallen world, this love comes with an unfortunate corollary: He loves us enough to allow us to experience the consequences of poor choices. Ultimately, this yields another corollary: He gives us the right to treat Him poorly, and the right to accordingly experience a loss of fellowship with Him. There is always grace, but if we do not choose to accept it, He still loves us enough to gift us with the consequences of our actions. We must learn to love others in the same way. We make excuses for the other, we try to nullify their actions by preventing the logical consequences of their choices. If I pretend like everything is okay, I can undo their choice to hurt me. It doesn't work, nor should it. Even if you hold the friendship together with fictions and chewing gum, you still cannot make them be a friend back. It is one thing to try to heal. It is another to enable. You need to respect their choice, and act accordingly. If they are not going to be a friend, then you are not friends. You lose a friend, as do they. But in reality, you already lost a friend when they made that choice. Allow them the dignity of causality. Give them the right to their choices, even if their choices are wrong.
There is one last step, whether or not we get out of the aircraft before impact. We need to let go of all shrapnel from the wreckage. There is a temptation to hold onto wounds as a final remembrance of the relationship. Even in this, we need to love them with dignity. If they chose to end the friendship, let them do it all the way. Give up the wounds to the Healer. Forgive them. This is the only good ending to the story. New stories cannot begin until the old ones are done, for if the past is always present, there can be no future. And who knows… perhaps the new story will be a redeemed version of the old one. Perhaps even with the same characters. Or perhaps not. Either way, the old must pass away to make room for the new.
So what's the right answer? What rule can we write? I'm not sure we can write any. The first line in any flight manual states, 'these procedures are not intended as a replacement for good judgment.' So we must turn to good judgment. And the best judgment comes from above. So we must first pray, yield our stories to Him and seek His will. And then we must do what makes sense. There is no point set in stone where you should automatically give up, no point where you must hold on come hell or high water. We must consider the level of commitment, the depth of the relationship and the nature of the dysfunction. But at least consider ejection. Above all, though, love the other person. Whether by fighting for the relationship or by recognizing their choice to end it. Love them whether or not you figure out how to save a life.
You know, ejection doesn't always turn out as poorly as one might think. Sometimes you might even get a chance to fly the same mission again. I ran into a friend about six months ago that I hadn't seen for years. This friend invited me to communicate, and I tried to. One of my biggest pet peeves is people who ignore others. People are busy, no doubt. But a one-sentence response shouldn't take four months. So never hearing back a good number of emails later, I felt ignored. The thought entered my mind to gently confront them. In the midst of accountability and counsel, I elected to eject instead. If they didn't feel obliged to communicate with me, then I didn't feel obliged to communicate with them. No vindictiveness, just certain expectations of friendship. So I let the thing run its course. I don't know if we'll ever really talk again. But if we do, there will be no bad blood from a last-ditch maneuver. I hear good judgment comes generally as a result of bad choices. Mine did. I pray you can save yourself the heartache and learn from mine.
The Fray's 'How to Save a Life' video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHg2q5M6WnY
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