Thursday, February 10, 2022
3:25 a.m. F, R, C, P. Last week you were talking about flares v. firecrackers, which I take to mean something that serves as continuing illumination v. something that sets off a sudden readjustment, perhaps what Bruce Moen used to call a cascading belief-system crash. This, I think, in context of reexamining our lives and our lives’ patterns, not so much in terms of intellectual logic as emotional logic. I take that to mean, – well, would you like to say more on the subject?
The question was, how can life seem so tedious or even insufferable sometimes (or, for some, most of the time) and life still be, in and of itself, good? The answer can only be – it inheres in the relation of the individual subjectivity to the whole. Another way to say it sounds like saying to people who suffer this way, “It’s your own fault.” We aren’t saying that, but it can look that way.
Because you also pointed out that our attitude toward life is basically our decision.
No, not that. That’s how people take it. What we say actually is that your path forward, from where you are, good or bad, comfortable or not, is always a decision. It is important to realize that we are not pretending that everyone starts in the same place. In fact, nobody starts in the same place. How could they? It may look that way, but that’s just people generalizing and making hasty conclusions. In practice you all know you are each unique, no matter how much you may have in common with others, or even with any one other. So any generalization about life that begins with the assumption that everybody, or even most people, start in more or less the same place, is on shaky grounds.
But although you don’t begin with identical combinations of threads, nor in identical life-situations, still you face more or less the same task: You live your life in 3D, one time-slice at a time, one decision at a time, never knowing what may be coming next, and never knowing how well or badly you’re doing, in terms of your overall life purpose. You’re swinging in the dark, and the amount of confidence you bring to the activity depends upon many things, no bundle of which is likely to be identical to any other. But you’re
Interrupted. Yes?
Life is not a decision, it is decisions. It is always a work in progress, as people say, but even a work that seems irretrievably flawed, or that seems to leave the author (or sculptor, or however you wish to think of it) with nowhere to go, no path forward, is not what it seems. Flaws in crystals give them unique properties. Flaws in people reflect as well as cause “external” effects. That is, it is always a failure of perspective (except when done deliberately) to consider your life as if it were a thing separate from all of life. Your individual life in a body is conducted among others living in bodies. Your mind is one drop in an ocean of mind. Your tasks, your themes, your problems/opportunities are special to you yourself and at the same time are representative of the universal problem of humanity. It cannot be a failure; nonetheless a sense of failure is among the flavors that life offers.
So when life feels like a failure, like an intolerable burden, what can we do, beyond deciding to keep slogging?
Well, for one thing you can decide to stop looking at it as slogging. A different attitude toward an unchanged situation is a change; it offers a way forward.
Viktor Frankl’s insight, once again. The one thing nobody can take from us.
But of course “the one thing nobody can take from you” is also, necessarily, “the one thing nobody can give to you.” It is one bit of autonomy in a life of interactions. That’s what makes things so hard for people who are depressed: Nobody can “snap them out of it” by cheery admonitions, nor by any other means. They can suggest, they can support, they can – in short – hope to ignite the spark that will do the trick, but it is always up to the individual to choose to change attitudes.
And of course in the circumstances that will often look to them like “in the teeth of the evidence.”
Yes. It will feel sometimes like playing pretend. Nonetheless, that is the way forward. Or, we should say, that is the proactive way forward. A less proactive way is to merely endure and hope for better days. And sometimes that is as much as anybody can do.
My assumption would be that doing whatever we can do is going to always be all that can be asked of us – I mean, sometimes we learn that we can do more than we thought we could, but no matter what our limit is,
You stopped.
Well, it occurred to me, I guess that’s one way we grow. Life pushes us to exceed what we thought were our limits.
Certainly true.
But in any case, my assumption is that life knows what it’s doing.
Yes, that’s your assumption now. You can hardly say it was your assumption throughout your life.
Hardly! No, it took decades to overcome my earlier years. Even today’s date reminds me. I was looking at Feb. 10, trying to remember its significance, and realized that February 10, 1983, was my last day on the job in New Jersey, thus the end of a long chapter of my life. By the end of the month we had moved to Virginia.
Which at first did not work out as you had hoped.
You can say that again. But it led to everything else, none of which could have happened if I had stayed in New Jersey.
Our point here is that what looked for a while like a huge mistake turned out to be a necessary link in an invisible chain of events that led to your actually getting what you had wanted and had scarcely deaired to hope possible.
Moral of story being that it pays to take chances when you are being prodded?
The moral we choose to call to your attention at the moment is, everything that happened to you, even at that desperate time in your life, happened because you did not lose your attitude of expectation, of hope. Even though you were pushing the stone uphill again, you did not allow yourself to draw the obvious conclusion that the task was impossible: You forced yourself not to give up hope.
And if I had clung to hope but had stayed in New Jersey?
Life knows what it’s doing, as a friend of ours said recently. Life finds a way. But maybe your life would have had to lay down the magical threads and pick up others, equally important but leading to very different results.
That’s an interesting way to put it. Some decisions close off certain possibilities, but there are always others.
Life knows what it’s doing, as you intuited, and as you believe.
Thanks for all this. Theme?
“Decisions and consequences,” perhaps. Or “There’s always a way forward.”
I’ll think about it. Okay, till next time.