In The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, the readers are introduced to main character 16 year old Holden Caulfield, who looks at life through an incredibly cynical lens. He doesn’t want to grow up. This is 1951 by the way. The Boomers – on the cusp of the Boom.
And, shit, I get it. He’s not wrong.
When Holden looks at the adult world, he sees:
Sex without tenderness.
Drinking without happiness.
Money without meaning.
Status without authenticity.
Adults who are supposed to protect children but turn a blind eye instead.
No wonder the kid doesn’t exactly seem thrilled about growing up.
Holden imagines himself standing at the edge of a field, catching children before they tumble over a cliff into all the ugliness he believes adulthood has waiting for them.
And I can see it from his point of view, can’t you?
The adult world can look pretty damn bleak from the outside. We’re supposedly handed this enormous landscape of choices and possibilities, yet everywhere you turn there are people carrying sad stories, regrets, remorse, divorce papers, abandoned dreams, bad decisions, and whole backpacks filled with broken roads and almosts that never quite became anything.
And you’re supposed to look at all of that and think:
Oh goody goody gumdrops! I can’t wait to grow up to choose one of these very sad experiences.
But here’s the part Holden wasn’t really being told:
The adults he spoke with didn’t have it figured out either.
And perhaps even more importantly, not every miserable thing that happened to them simply happened to them.
Sometimes we participate in our own misery.
Oof.
Nobody likes that part.
It feels much better to think life is something happening around us while we stand innocently in the center of it. The boss screwed me over. The relationship destroyed me. The friendship failed me. The business didn’t work. The world didn’t recognize me. The opportunity passed me by.
And sometimes that’s exactly what happened.
There are things in this life we absolutely do not choose. People die. People betray us. Bodies get sick. Companies close. Natural disasters happen. Other people’s decisions crash into our lives without asking permission first. There are victims in this world. There are people who do horrible things. There are circumstances so unfair that trying to turn them immediately into some spiritual lesson becomes cruelty dressed up as wisdom.
But there is another category of suffering.
That’s the category I’m talking about.
The kind where, somewhere along the road, our own hand was on the wheel.
We heard the small warning voice trying to steer us in a different direction, and we ignored it. If we prayed about it, maybe God said no—or maybe He left the whole thing foggy enough that we could convince ourselves there was still room to negotiate.
So we press our luck.
Maybe that soft no was actually an eventual yes.
Maybe.
And then it all falls down.
Because somewhere underneath all of our rationalizing, we KNEW damn well how this thing was probably going to work out. But that little devil in the ego whispered, “Yeah, but what if?”
So we play the odds.
Even knowing they’re vehemently stacked against us, we make the play anyway.
And we’re careful about it. That’s the funny part. We don’t usually throw ourselves blindly into disaster. We plan. We strategize. We do everything we think we’re supposed to do in order to assure victory—because victory is still the goal, even after we’ve shoved our Spirit, conscience, intuition, whatever you want to call it, back into its little box and closed the lid.
Then we forge ahead with our wishes.
We understand, somewhere deep down, that the whole situation could go sideways, but that little butterfly of hope—or maybe it’s just the ego wearing prettier clothes—keeps insisting that everything is going to be great.
Real great.
Real, real great.
You know?
And then—shit.
Whoops.
It all falls apart.
And suddenly we’re sitting in the middle of our own mud, preferably in the dark, because mud isn’t nearly as fun when it’s illuminated.
Illumination would require us to actually look at what happened.
And looking at what happened might require responsibility for our own enlightenment.
Still, suffering is suffering is suffering.
And it all sucks.
So, I get Holden.
Some people think The Catcher in the Rye is an acid trip. Others have managed to reduce it to something vulgar or obscene and completely miss the point.
I see it as a book about a young man waking up to the world as it actually is, rather than the world he was told was supposed to exist.
And that’s a hell of an awakening.
Everything looks great when it’s sitting exactly where it’s supposed to be.
The family in the family photo. The successful adult behind the desk. The respectable marriage. The respectable job. The respectable life.
But how often does anything stay exactly where it’s supposed to be?
I’m right there with Holden, standing at the edge of that cliff.
Because I want the world I was sold.
I want the good people to be rewarded. I want love to be enough. I want hard work to pay off. I want marriages to last when two people promise they will. I want parents to protect their children. I want the people in charge to actually know what they’re doing. I want integrity to matter. I want doing the right thing to somehow guarantee a decent ending.
I want adulthood to look the way it looked in the brochure. Motherfuckers made it look kind of good, right? Well, good until reality sets in (independence is a fool’s journey).
But it doesn’t.
Maybe that’s the part Holden can’t reconcile yet.
Growing up isn’t simply discovering that the world is ugly. It’s discovering that the world contains beauty and ugliness at the same time—and that adulthood doesn’t come with some magical moment when somebody finally explains which is which.
There isn’t always a responsible adult coming.
Sometimes we are the responsible adult.
Sometimes we’re the one standing at the edge of the cliff.
Sometimes we’re trying to catch somebody else.
Sometimes we’re trying to catch ourselves.
And sometimes we’re forced to admit that nobody pushed us at all.
We walked right up to the edge, looked down, heard every warning voice behind us, and still thought:
Yeah, but what if?
