Can there be an All Is Lost Moment in nonfiction?

The year was 1980. I was living in New York and driving a taxicab. The short version is I finished Novel #3 and couldn’t sell it (much like Novels #1 and #2.)

Why do we (so often) need an All Is Lost Moment in our own lives to break through to another level? Can’t we just do it at a happy time? Do we have to push ourselves to the absolute abyss in order for real change to sink in?

Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” 

We started to talk last week about the All is Lost Moment, both in stories and our real lives. (I’m going to spend the next few weeks examining this, particularly as it relates to our own Wildernesss Passages).

Almost every Wilderness Passage reaches its crisis in what screenwriters call an “All Is Lost Moment.”

We’ve talked in these posts about various intervals or periods of our lives being Wilderness Passages. Can it be that life itself, start to finish, is a Wilderness Passage?

My friend Charlie is training now for sea-kayaking solo around Ireland. The passage will take weeks. Charlie will paddle 10-15 hours a day, camp ashore each night, then set off again the next morning. This will be no modest or risk-free enterprise. Seas, even in summer, can be monstrous off the rugged Irish coast. As Charlie himself admits, you have to be a little nuts to conceive of, and then live out, this kind of wild-and-woolly adventure. 

The psychic geography of a wilderness passage goes something like this:

You and I may think, in the depths of our Wilderness Passage, that the ordeal we’re undergoing is unique. And it is, in the sense that our passage is ours alone; no one else has ever, or will ever, go through the same initiation.