Live and learn

Saturday, January 8, 2022

5:45 a.m. You’re up, my friends. Setting my switches, but without any idea if we are on track or wandering.

Would it matter? Daniel Boone, “confused” in the wilderness of Kentucky for three days, was still in the process of discovering even when he didn’t know where he was or (consequently) which objective he was moving toward.

That sentence got a little bit jumbled. I know you meant, even when he didn’t know what the next thing was going to be, the process of being lost was nonetheless contributing to his overall mapping of the territory in his mind.

Destinations are sometimes overrated as a goal. The process itself is a goal not negligible.

“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive”?

We don’t say “better”; we will say with Richard Burton [a famous nineteenth-century traveler] quoted by Thoreau: “Voyaging is a victory.” You may wish to consider the act of living an inquiry as a filling-in of the crossword puzzle.

Thus, we are in the process of doing several things, or, perhaps we should say, doing one thing – providing a new way to experience your life as you go along – with many aspects. Clearly we can’t explore them all at once; equally clearly, we can’t explore each as if in isolation from all the others. Less clear, but equally true, we can explore by wandering, just as easily as by pursuing any one aspect at a time. The end-goal is to reorient you, not to reinvent you. You will reinvent (or rather, rediscover) yourselves as you go along. It is that self-rediscovery process, not the sketching of the territory, that is important to us. This is what we said recently: Step by step, day by day, in this internet era,  and who cares if it is bound into volumes and stored on bookshelves along hundreds of other books each promising enlightenment. Enlightenment comes as a continuing process, not as an end-result to be rested upon. If you become enlightened, there remains the question of what you see when the lights are on. But that scenery has been well described many times, from many viewpoints, in many ways that may seem to contradict each other.

• Who are you?
• What are you doing here?
• What is “here”?
• Where did it come from and where is it headed (if anywhere)?
• What are your opportunities and obstacles?

This is no new list of questions. Every age has them. Some ages, some cultures, live in a state of thinking the questions have been answered. Some think them unanswerable. Everyone else is somewhere between these poles. And within each age and culture and subculture are sects and individuals, each with its own beliefs and needs and questions and implicit goals.

Only – just to confuse things by revealing another complication – remember that each of you lives in connection (via your strands) with others whose beliefs and experiences do not match yours. Nobody is a unit in terms of beliefs, because nobody is a unit, period. So nothing stands still for long.

Now, you page backward, trying to see if there was a theme we somehow wandered from, despite what we are saying right now, because what we are saying doesn’t seem to be worth very much, it’s too obvious. But in another moment, maybe it won’t be all that obvious even to those who whom it is not a new thought. In another moment, it may be far from your then-current thought, and may spark a worthwhile connection to something else.

Well, truly, it doesn’t seem like we accomplished much in half an hour.

We smile. The results of traveling hopefully are often underrated.

Surely you can see that we come to every day hoping for some new bit of information.

And surely you can see that it is more important to live what you have already found than to be forever deferring living it until you have been given all of it. There is no “all.” You can’t put an ocean into a sand-bucket. But you can learn about seawater by tasting what is in the bucket, faster than by waiting for the bucket to hold more than it can. Live your knowledge day by day; it is the only way to increase the capacity of the bucket.

Except – you are the bucket. A 3D individual (with all your ramifying connections across time and across threads) is a finite window on all-that-is, and all-that-is experiences itself precisely through the uncounted and uncountable windows scattered through time and space. In one direction, the 3D individual sends its reports: “Here is what is going on in my vicinity.” In the other direction, the 3D individual receives its reports: “Here is as much of what you want to know as you can receive at the moment.” It is an uninterrupted communication back and forth, regardless if the 3D individual is consciously aware of it or not. (Really, we should say regardless of how much or how little the 3D individual is aware of, for no one is aware of nothing, any more than anyone is aware of everything. As usual, a bell-curve, not a binary choice.)

Now, we are enriching your life as best we can, sending out sparks rather than handing out assignments or reading from set lesson-plans. Here is today’s spark: Be a little patient with your life. Things are working better than you fear, if not necessarily as well as you wish.

Nor do we have the data from which to judge.

Certainly that. If you will remember that even your so-called negative emotions have their place in your life, you will find it easier.

Say some more on that?

Say you’re impatient: Your life isn’t going anywhere, or is going in the wrong direction, or is too painful, or whatever. Is that impatience somehow isolated from “you”? is it somehow isolated from “your life”? Is it some intruder that inexplicably is messing up the otherwise perfect mandala you would have created? Or is it appropriate in time and circumstance?

By “appropriate,” I recognize that you do not mean, “It is necessarily a good thing,” but what you do mean is not entirely clear.

We mean, whatever comes front and center in your life, does so for a reason. Deal with it not as intruder but as messenger. You’ll learn more, and the journey itself will be smoother, although “smooth journey” is not necessarily what everybody signed up for, or even prefers. Daniel Boone would not have been Daniel Boone by riding on an interstate highway. The ride would have been smoother physically and intolerable mentally and emotionally. He wasn’t after a smooth ride. Neither are you, any of you. You couldn’t have been born into your time if your priority had been a smooth ride. Of course, this could be an essay in itself, for “a smooth ride” means different things in different contexts, and of course everything is comparative. But you get the point. People who are experiencing the 20^th and 21^st centuries as a smooth ride may be standing right next to you, but they are living in a different world.

Yes, I get it. Today’s theme, then?

What about “Live and learn”? That has a certain ambiguity that may appeal to you.

It does. Sort of quietly ironic. I like it. Okay, thanks and see you next time.