Me and My Shadow

Peter Pan Vs. The Eight Worldly Winds

I taught a trick to my shadow to stick to the tip of my toe.

I was a theater kid growing up, a borderline child-actor. I say “borderline” because I never got my big break, never made the leap from community theater to commercials and TV, though it was not for lack of trying. Back then, my mom, who had her own 9 to 5, would regularly take time off work to pick me up in the middle of the school day, and we’d battle traffic together up the 405 or the 5, from Orange County to L.A., and I’d audition for this or that detergent ad or afterschool special. I never got anything—literally nothing. My one small victory is I got a call-back for what became the Fred Savage part in The Wonder Years. Sometimes it’s fun to imagine what my life would have been like if I’d gotten that part. Probably pretty cool, right? I doubt it. Remember, I’m a recovering alcoholic, so it stands to reason that I’d have been one of those child-actor horror stories, blowing all my showbiz money on drugs, going in and out of rehabs, waking up in ditches, doing a tell-all episode of The Rosie O'Donnell Show as I geared up for my next relapse. It would have been bleak.  

But like I said that didn’t happen. What I did instead was a boatload of community theater, specifically musical theater, plus performing in various local variety show troupes, plus taking all the voice and tap and acting lessons that go along with that. Two things are therefore true: 1. To this day, I own a pair of size-13 tap shoes, owing to my growth spurt in early high school; and 2. I am uncannily familiar with the musical theater cannon from about the ‘50s on up through the early ‘90s. The Music Man and Oklahoma!, Damn Yankees and South Pacific, Phantom, Cats, Les Mis (I’m one of those people who likes Les Mis so much that I refer to it simply as Les Mis). All that stuff is up there knockin’ around my brain, taking up space where the quadratic formula or the capital of South Dakota might otherwise be.

I’m now going to attempt to relate all this back to Buddhism and a reflection I recently had. 

The other day it was 7am, and I was doing my regular morning walk with our three dogs and a baby strapped to my chest, when all of the sudden the song “I’ve Gotta Crow” from the Peter Pan musical popped into my head. This was not a coincidence. For one thing, as I just got done explaining, there’s a jukebox full of dozens of these songs up there, and it’s never far from malfunctioning, spitting out bits and pieces of tunes all shuffled up at random. And then the other thing is that I found myself in the exact mood captured in the song, which is a sort of low-level mania where you’re very much in your feelings about how great you are and how many things are going well in your life. I mean, this was basically Peter’s whole thing, right? He was conceived prior to the DSM, but can’t we assume he had untreated bipolar and was prone to fits of mania (uh, “flying”!?), who, because of this, could never “grow up,” i.e. assume adult responsibilities, and so inhabited a “neverland” where one’s emotional instabilities and mental hiccups were not just tolerated but idolized? That all scans, right?

(OK, interstitial storytime: I played a Lost Boy in the Fullerton Civic Light Opera’s production of Peter Pan when I was around 11; this represents the one and only time I was ever paid for any of this acting or musical theater stuff. If memory serves, it was $100, which…why even bother? But the real reward was one day after rehearsals, the stagehands stayed late so each of us lost boys could take a turn being hooked into the elaborate system of winches and pulleys that facilitated the “flying” that only the folks playing Peter, Wendy, Michael and John got to do. And man, I’m telling you, those fives minutes I got to fly around the set were freakin’ awesome—I felt like an astronaut and a Broadway star rolled into one. Also, a few years ago I did EMDR, which is where you attempt to follow a ping-ponging series of difficult/traumatic emotions back through various points of your life to when and where you first felt them, as a shrink stimulates different parts of your brain. This is supposed to help retrace and defuse past trauma, and what we discovered during this process is many of the feelings I associate with the extreme depression and self-harm of my adolescence and early adulthood can be traced back to the profound sense of loss my kid brain experienced when that particular production of Peter Pan ended, specifically the deeply felt sense that I would never again spend time with this slightly older girl in the production that I had a big crush on, and associated with true and everlasting love. It was a real Rosebud moment. Go figure!)

OK so back to the song: “I gotta crow/ I’m just the cleverest fellow t’was ever my fortune to know/ I taught a trick to my shadow to stick to the tip of my toe/ I gotta crow.” It helps maybe to remember that this is musical theater and these lines are being belted out by a man-child dressed in green felt pajamas who can literally fly. And yeah that’s how I felt: manic and festooned and a little bit high.  

It wasn’t more than two weeks ago that everything felt terribly bleak. I had some looming and fairly big career decisions to make, my knee was aching and it seemed like maybe my decision to get back into running was a mistake, and then of course there was the political situation which I was taking way too personally. There was this whole stretch of about two weeks where I’d wake up every morning and my first thought would be fear at the day ahead. Does that ever happen to you?

But then everything turned around. I made my decisions, got some good work news, the political situation improved in a big way, and for a few minutes on that walk I literally felt like breaking into song, and might have if I didn’t already look crazy enough walking three dogs with a baby strapped to my chest.

The Buddha lived about 2,600 years ago, before twitter and carry trades and 538, and yet he was nevertheless familiar with the concepts of prestige and material success and bad knees. He discussed those things in a teaching referred to as the Eight Worldly Winds, from the Lokavipatti Sutta, which is often paraphrased like so: 

"Praise and blame,
gain and loss,
pleasure and pain,
fame and disrepute
are the eight worldly winds.
They ceaselessly change.

As a mountain is
unshaken by the wind,
so the heart of a person
is unmoved
by all the changes on this earth."

Easier said that done, though, right? We live in a scorekeeping, achievement-oriented, appearance-obsessed world. We’re encouraged to trumpet our successes and brush off our losses, as if the former’s all the matters and the latter never happened. But both are inevitable. We will all experience pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and disrepute. I happen to like mindfulness as a practice because it helps me to see when my head is floating off into the clouds of some personal victory, as was the case the other day.

Later that day, I was on the phone with someone in recovery, and they could hear it in my voice, and said as much, and made some suggestions for things to think about. Come back down to earth, was the subtext. Remember we’re all just people struggling together, no one more or less special than anyone else. It can be surprisingly hard to remember this, and I was grateful for the nudge.

It reminds me of one of my favorite showtunes, but I’ll keep it to myself.

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This is the Healings Newsletter. We thank you for reading. Healings is free for all, but you can show your appreciation for the work we do with a paid subscription. A portion of all proceeds goes to the Patient Advocate Foundation.

Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.

Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.