superheroes
I learn so much from my grandkids. This month’s wisdom teaching comes from the three-year-old, explaining the role of superheroes.
Drawing a line of tall figures with round, staring eyes, he explained, “These are ghosts….” The ghosts are drawn in dark hues of purple, blue, and black. Their unformed faces feel vague and detached. Their bodies without limbs stretch like heavy robes to the ground, solid and imposing.
Ghosts. I think of all the images and stories we allow to haunt us, not only from fiction, but from our own histories. We can be tormented by unsettling visions from our past lives – especially our very-recent-past lives. Even from what is happening right in front of us, right now.
“These are ghosts that scare people,” my grandson said, confirming what I know to be all too true. “But they don’t scare Bruce Banner, because he saves people.”
Ah, the hero.
My grandson loves this particular superhero – not just The Hulk. He loves Bruce Banner. The ordinary guy who becomes something more than he is, on occasion. Through outrage at what he sees happening before him.
Even if your whole goal is simply to help people’s lives suck less, that’s so much more than a lot of people are offering. If the ghosts are our fears, our regrets, or what we become when we succumb to hopelessness, then Hulk might be a reminder of the double edges of being a superhero. It’s the injustices of bullying and exploiting and defeating ordinary people – the situations that create ghosts – that bring on Hulk’s roar. The price: you often feel like just smash, smash, smashing things.
The one who actually saves people is Bruce Banner. Because, using his great scientific mind and huge heart, he learns to tame and manage The Hulk. While Hulk’s superpowers are strength and endurance, Bruce Banner’s superpower is compassion. For himself, for his least nuanced and most aggravated reactions. For his primitive, irrational chest-thumping. For going green with rage and frustration.
Bruce Banner just keeps working at it.
My grandson drew some sidekicks for The Hulk. He made “Yellow Scrabble,” whose superpower I have decided is decimating wordplay, leaving a bad guy speechless with a triple-word-score comeback to his irritating remark, the superpower we all dream of. And “Blue Bowling Ball Man,” who, tiptoeing like a ballerina and then kicking that leg back with a flourish worthy of Fred Astaire, uses his weekend nonchalance in blatantly unattractive league wear to Simply. Not. Care. What. You. Think. The ultimate superpower. Blue Bowling Ball Man will play his game, his way, for the win. And have fun doing it.
May we all join forces against the fierce “Pink Bad Guy,” whose portrait looks like just a hot mess of disorganized, naked human frailty, fighting against all of us as hard as possible. Maybe Bruce Banner can tame this brute, too, in time.
Or maybe we can each tame Pink Bad Guy, using our words, like Yellow Scrabble, and our brains and self-compassion, like Bruce, and our devil-may-care individuality, channeling our inner Blue Bowling Ball Man. Wishing us all the strength and endurance to let go when what we’d really like to do is just smash, smash, smash; to keep trying to turn that split into a spare, using a little English to turn things around. Heroic indeed.