Thursday, August 4, 2022
5:05 a.m. I am caught by the date, August 4, the date it all fell apart, in 1914. One hundred eight years later, the dissolution continues to gather steam. It has been a hard fast descent, and no end in sight. It is only faith that argues that rebirth is occurring, hidden in the vortex of changes.
I wake up half-remembering my poem I sent around, the one I wrote about Kesey’s death in November, 2001. I wish I could have all the poetry accessible in my mind, rather than interrupted fragments. But, no point wishing, I suppose.
Yesterday’s ILC meeting got to talking about retirement, and the confusion in our thought that can follow. I’ve had a good long dose of it – if you mean freedom from external routines, as opposed to lack of internal purpose.
And I’ve been re-treading that same old “if only” sequence that would change the events of the war so that the United States was never pulled into it. But the remorseless logic of it called for everything to plunge in. Even Wilson’s care to keep us out after “Lusitania” only bought us couple of years.
But why go over it and over it? Same story with the second round. As Carl Jung said, better for us to stay out as long as possible, that it damage us less. But still we were plunged into the descent, perhaps faster than ever because of our own sudden predominance at the end of it.
All right, guys, what’s all this? It only now occurs to me that you may have a reason for flicking the fly past the trout that I am to you.
You’ve been reading Maurice Walsh.
Smiling. Guilty as charged. [Fishing plays a large part in several of his stories.] But the question remains: Why do you have me thinking, now writing, about the wars and the descent? Setting switches for maximum F, R, C, P. Looking back a few pages, I remember we were discussing good and evil, yet again.
A recent focus of ours has been aimed at gently encouraging you – anyone reading this – to not endlessly tread and re-tread the same corn, to not endlessly rehash the same tired opinions, reactions, associations. You each have narratives you constructed out of your own life and the life “around” you, experienced second-hand. Well and good, as raw materials. Not so good, as endless reprocessing from an unchanged viewpoint.
I get that that sentence doesn’t quite mean what it first appears to.
No. here’s the point: You, every minute, are slightly or sometimes radically different from who you were before. Each new “you” – each combination of personal subjectivity and shared subjectivity and “the times” – has the opportunity to see things afresh. Don’t be squandering it by playing the same old tapes. By “old tapes,” we mean, not only old familiar topics, but, more, old familiar attitudes. In other words, don’t just drift, allowing old tapes to provide you the illusion of being present; participate. Bring to the present moment a present self, not a tape of a previous self, pretending or assuming that nothing has changed.
I’m thinking of Skip Atwater’s comment, and of the saying that you can’t step twice into the same river.
Exactly. You will find it worthwhile to pursue the thought.
Skip said to me one day – this had to have been many years ago – that he had just come out of a program with a new, striking, realization sparked by a very familiar word. Somebody said “participant,” and Skip said he realized that that’s what he wanted, to be a participant in life. And that’s what you’re saying here. Being in a given moment, we should actively be in that moment.
And the river.
Well, we can’t step twice into the same river because the river is always changing. But – so are we!. Why bring an old version of ourself to a new situation?
Or, to coin a phrase, “Be here now.”
Yet, is it even possible? You’ve reminded us many times that you (we) can’t live always on the stretch; that we need to alternate alertness and relaxation.
Follow the fly.
As I wrote living “on the stretch,” I half-remembered that Thoreau aspired to live always “on the stretch” – his words. It was a part of his continuing resolution, at least as a young man. He was only 30 when he left Walden, after all.
So which is it? Live always on the stretch, or stretch and relax, stretch and relax?
That’s a false dichotomy, I think. If anything, you’re baiting us. If it is impossible to do the one, then clearly we must do the other, or do some third thing.
So then, if you can’t always be on the stretch, in the nature of things, is there any reason to reproach yourselves for not doing what can’t be done? And at the ame time, if stretching to meet the present moment with your full attention is sometimes possible, and is sometimes called for, shouldn’t you give a little thought to how to maximize your chances of living consciously?
I seem to hear a half-submerged theme that I wish I had noted as we went along, the theme being how to take advantage of religious and philosophical instructions to get the clues that would help us live our life more consciously. That is, life more abundantly. The whole explanation of sins as errors and virtues as helpful habits; the concentration on seeing how we are more, and are different, than we usually see ourselves to be; the inculcation of habits to live more deeply even in trivial moments – it all comes to the same thing, really. “Be here, now, and here’s how to do it.”
Other than “trivial moments” (how would you know how to tell a trivial from an important moment?), yes.
And as I get up to refill my coffee mug, I remember Benjamin Rush saying that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, at the convention that declared independence, “thought for us all.” I had a flashing sense that this is what we’re doing, these mornings, thinking about things most people don’t have leisure or background to do.
You could say that that is everybody’s task (and privilege), to think for you all, because you each have lived a different piece of the puzzle. Some people experience with paper and pen, some with interpersonal relationships, some with “external” tasks, some with pondering and feeling. In truth, you all do a little of each, of course in different proportions. But it is important that you not take yourselves too little seriously. You are used to thinking that you shouldn’t take yourselves too seriously, and this is true, in that you don’t want to be misled by trivial egotistic exaggerations. But equally, you don’t want to take yourself too little seriously. The universe doesn’t have any spare parts, and nobody is only an extra in his or her own movie, no matter what else is happening from other viewpoints.
Well, thanks for all this, as always. Or do you have more you want to say at the moment?
Good enough for the moment. What would you say the theme has been?
Some new variant of the same old theme of “Be here, now.”
Then maybe, “Be here, now, a new variant.”
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. In any case, thanks and we’ll see you next time.