The best thing to do when I am sad or frightened is to learn. It sounds so simple, it works so well.

If you live long enough, and I am getting there, I sometimes find myself trapped in an old way of thinking, or being, or loving. I see the world changing all around me, and I don’t know what to do.

All my life – I think this is true of every life – I sometimes find the world collapsing in on me, I am drowning in sadness and full of fear. I love change and accept it, but sometimes life comes after me with little warning or time to react.

I call those hard times in my life, my walls of flame, and I remember an old sailor’s poem that says when a man is trapped in a burning boat, he must move with courage through the wall of flame and into the greater sea beyond.

For many years, I stumbled through these walls of flame and out into the wider world, and I survived.

I remember leaving home, going off to college, being terrified to go to school, losing a job, running out of money, losing my first love, then another,  descending into panic, moving to the country, leaving my family, choking nearly to death on loneliness and panic.

I got this idea into my head in Hebron, the first farm; when I finally hit a wall of flame that I couldn’t walk or run, though, then the way to climb out of this awful place was to learn.

It sounds so simple. It is and it isn’t.

One time, I took guitar lessons.

Another, I learned how to play the drums. One time, I learned how to herd sheep with a dog and did it for years. I wrote part of a play that was performed in New York City. I sold a book excerpt to a magazine. I left the corporate world to write books.

I found that whenever I learned something, it jarred me loose and pulled me out of myself.

When I hit a wall of flame, I was always terrified, I often thought of not walking through the wall, but letting it consume me. I felt sure there was no help for me, nowhere to go. I felt trapped in my existence. I felt like I was drowning rather than burning.

I kept learning.

What I learned was to surrender my stubbornness, ambition, and dreams of controlling my life. This meant becoming humble and facing up to the worst parts of me. It meant finding ways to step outside of myself and the problems life keeps presenting.

I volunteered to become a hospice worker and learned about the nature and truth of life.

I began taking photographs and learned how to see the world anew.

I got help, and it helped.

I learned how to live on a 90-acre farm by myself with donkeys and sheep and barn cats and chickens and dogs.

I learned how to breed lambs.

I learned how to sing to a donkey (with the help of Willie Nelson).

I learned how to love and honor a dog.

I learned how to start my blog and write every single day of my life.

I learned how to walk through the most painful wall of flame, my dying 35-year old marriage, and into the open and sometimes lonely world.

I learned what love was and how to find it and keep it.

I learned to face the reality of me.

I learned that I am called to do good for others than myself, and find the great rewards of giving.

I learned what empathy was and how to feel and understand it.

A spiritual teacher I worked with for more than a year taught me to “let the ribs of ego burn.” It took a pretty big flame to do that.

But this is what I learned: I will survive, and more than that. I got to go through the wall to an unimaginably beautiful shore, a home, and to open a curtain that showed me the way to the rest of my life.

The most important thing that I learned was when I faced my wall of flames; it was time to learn.

That was the way to the open water.

To this day, it grounds and sustains me. It was so simple, and it took me so long to see it.