Hitchhiking As Spiritual Experience
Reflections on surrender, amor fati and the power of a smile.
Would you take a ride with a complete stranger?
Zooming down the Autobahn at over a hundred miles per hour, I felt my body being firmly but evenly pushed back into the passenger-side car seat from the BMW’s torque like a vertical weighted blanket. The quiet growl of the engine belied the smoothness of the ride as my eyes widened and pelvic floor puckered with adrenalin. Trees, cars and the highway's broken lines whooshed past at an allegro clip.
What had I gotten myself into? I had decided to hitchhike to Amsterdam after spending a weekend celebrating Oktoberfest with a couchsurfer I had met some months prior in my hometown of Vancouver. I figured it would make for a good story. I was not wrong.
Mere moments later my benefactor, a plainclothes policeman commuting to work, insisted I would be fine as I stepped out of his BMW and onto my perch: a triangular median in the middle of a highway junction outside Munich. The day was beautiful: sunny with clear blue skies, fluffy white clouds and verdant green grass on this small piece of no man's land. He drove off.
I felt totally and completely fucked.
Standing upon this literal and figurative crossroads, the utter direness of my situation was so clear there was no way I was proceeding without help from strangers just like the cop. There was no going back. By grace, this realization sunk in immediately and I made the best of it: with head held high and chest thrust out, I offered a megawatt smile and extended both my arms with upturned thumbs, doubling my chances of meeting my next ride. My heart felt light, almost mirthful and I imagine I may have looked like a cross between a hitchhiking Christ the Redeemer and Buddy Christ from Kevin Smith’s Dogma.
The takeaway: smile when you’re fucked.
Amor fati. Love whatever is happening.
As Nietzsche writes, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”
Simple, but not easy.
I could have sat down and curled up into the fetal position. I could have protested to the heavens. I could have repetitively uttered expletives like some dark mantra. It seems unlikely any of these would have improved my situation one iota.
This is not “good vibes only,” rejecting anything less than desirable, shunning the darkness that makes up at least half (or more) of the human experience, but embracing it.
In order to love what is happening, we must first accept it. In order to accept it, we must first be aware. Without mindful awareness we are simply jerked around at the mercy of our emotions, triggers and conditioning. As Victor Frankl observed, “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” That little triangular median in the middle of nowhere was my space.
Amor fati also parallels the practice of metta meditation where one generates feelings of loving-kindness towards self and others. It is like metta for one’s life with its attendant peaks and valleys. It is a practice of trust, grace and letting go.
The wisdom of these everyday clichés is easily overlooked: c’est la vie, que sera sera, it is what it is. Counterintuitively, dire circumstances can serve as either a forcing function for surrender or an invitation to despair. The metaphor of hell as a bottomless pit is apt: there is no situation so bad it can’t be made worse. I invite you to instead choose the path of surrender.
It turns out the cop was right: the first car stopped within a few minutes though they weren’t going in the direction I needed; my next ride came shortly thereafter. Like Odysseus, enjoy the twists and turns of life, learn to love whatever is happening, and smile when you’re fucked.