The False Crawl

If you find yourself entering into situations, conversations, or interactions innocently or with good intentions only to find yourself at a dead end (at best) or engulfed in what-the-heck-just-happened chaos (at worst)…

When I first moved to the beach, I’d walk right by turtle tracks, thinking they were tire marks. In my defense, Daytona Beach permits vehicles on the sand.

In time, I came to recognize turtle tracks. I’ve never seen a mama come ashore to nest, but I’ve watched babies waddle back to the sea. There’s nothing like it—pure awe.

On my walk one morning, I saw two sets of tracks, but they were both false crawls. For those of you not in the know, a false crawl is when mama crawls up onto the sand, sometimes quite a distance, and then changes her mind about laying eggs there. She turns around and heads back to the sea. I suspect that those two false crawls may have been the same turtle looking for her ideal nesting spot.

I can only imagine the effort that goes into this process. She has to haul her body out of the sea, drag herself up the beach, her flippers propelling her forward in the sand. It seems like an incredible expenditure of energy and a great delay on her journey when her crawl is unsuccessful.

Does that sound familiar? Isn’t that how it feels when we find ourselves in an exhausting situation or emotional interaction? Even worse, when we’ve been there before but didn’t see it coming…again?

This is our version of the false crawl. But unlike the turtle, who can only know it was a false crawl in hindsight, we have the ability to know better in advance.

Some friends and I were revisiting conversations we’d had in a group chat over the past year in which we recounted trying events in our lives. The similarities were startling, the cycles obvious. Each time, there was angst, reflection, and then a return to peace, only to have the cycle repeat—often with the same people and situations—as if we had learned nothing.

Thoughts and emotions are part of the human experience. We’d be fine if we just observed the thoughts and allowed ourselves to feel the emotions.

Feelings of loneliness, or of being unlovable, unworthy, not enough, unvalued, disrespected, unseen, misunderstood…

Instead, we script a whole story around them. “I feel this way because of (pick one…or several) you, this, that, him, her, them.” There may be some finger-pointing, but that finger will never point out the true reason for our angst.

We falsely believe each difficult interaction is unique and has its own cause. But it is just a different form of the same underlying problem. A problem that has been with us since the beginning of time as we know it. The belief that we are separate.

Spiritual traditions have long tried to enlighten us as we struggled with this false belief. Religious myths and metaphors have explained the reason for our suffering.

My friends and I happen to be students of A Course in Miracles. We have a map that indicates the way to peace, along with the choices that will lead us into a false crawl. Other spiritual paths, religions, philosophy, and psychology all have their version of the map as well. Truth is Truth, no matter where it is found. Even Yoda will suffice. You will be met wherever you are.

You may understand the issue as “the tiny, mad idea” from A Course in Miracles in which we mistakenly believed we could be separate from God, and how all fear and projection stem from that misbelief. Or the Judeo-Christian teaching in which Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree of knowledge and suffered a shift from innocence and connection to self-conscious separation and fear.

Maybe the principles of psychology make more sense to you. Or Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, or Rumi’s reminder that we are not separate drops in the ocean but the entire ocean in a drop.

Or if you prefer your philosophy with a fistful of popcorn, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter,” Yoda tells us. We are more than our body, more than our emotions, and more than our fears. The Force connects all living things, but when a Jedi gives in to fear, anger, or attachment — the pull of the Dark Side — the connection to that greater, unifying presence is forgotten.

This is what happens when we enter into situations believing we are separate beings with specific, special needs that must be met rather than remembering we are part of a loving oneness that is whole—without holes that need to be filled. Life begins to look like just one repetitive conflict or nothingburger. When the dust settles, we may even realize how meaningless it all was and question why we persisted?

The turtle doesn’t know at the outset of its crawl, but with a bit of reflection on the ways our misbeliefs about separation color our existence in these bodies, we can become more observant of the patterns in our interactions…the things that trip us up…the way fear makes us react.

Then, when we enter into the cycle again, we can pause and remember: this isn’t about what we think it’s about. This is fear, judgment, ego-based thinking at work. As the Course says, we can choose again to realign with love, forgiveness, and the Holy Spirit (or higher self).

The Truth is, we’ve never been separate. The false crawl ends the moment we remember who we really are.