Thursday, June 23, 2022
6:25 a.m. Care to expand on yesterday’s answer to our drumming question?
[“What possibilities may we be overlooking?”
[Look for things that seem too good to happen, and visualize them, instead of reenforcing that they can’t happen. This means internal changes no less than external ones. Rather than specify for you what could change, we will leave it at the reminder that much is possible.]
Or would you rather leave it as it is?
If we were to add anything, it would be that imagination tends to harden, with age, in the way that Elmer’s Glue, say, hardens. That is, it is a natural process, this hardening, and so there’s nothing wrong with it, and at the same time it is a useful process, and so there is something right with it. If glue didn’t harden, it wouldn’t perform its function; if it began as hardened, it wouldn’t perform its function. Only when it begins fluid, and hardens upon use, does it perform as envisaged. So with imagination. As a child, you are overwhelmed with the possibilities on every side. Since you can’t know what is possible and what is not, you do not prematurely assume that your dreams are not “realistic,” and hence sometimes you are able to move toward achieving them. However, that very fluidity makes it very difficult for you to stick to something (if you will pardon the play on words).
Kazantzakis (in Report to Greco, I think) said woe to the person who begins life without lunacy.
What is clearly lunacy – looking back from middle age – may appear in yet another, more favorable, light when seen from old age. Life is not so much about external achievement, as youth is tempted to think it is; and internal achievement, though mostly invisible to others and especially to oneself, is taking place as you go along. As your viewpoint changes, with experience, your judgments will alter as well.
However, that being said, remember that it is always useful to at least consider the path not taken, every so often. Sometimes you want to unglue this or that, and restructure things by applying glue to things hitherto unconnected. In short, your life isn’t over until it’s over. At any point in life, you may decide, “This is the pattern I’m happy with; no more changes needed or even desired.” But then perhaps on another day, you feel (not merely think or speculate) that “The end is not yet.” If John Adams could set about learning Hebrew in his late eighties, what would make you think it is too late to be beginning anything?
And from somewhere is coming Henry Thoreau’s statement about leisure. “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one. But worst of all is when you are yourself the slave-driver.” Something like that.
That process may be regarded as a hardening, if you wish.
Dave Garland shared the diagram of the Japanese concept of Ikigai (“A Reason for Being”) yesterday. That is the ideal state of convergence of four conditions: What you love, What you’re good at, What the world needs, and What you can be paid for. I have a feeling that the final condition might be rephrased as “What the world values,” which isn’t quite the same thing.
No, not quite the same thing, and a valuable nuance. You who are retired, living on your investments or on your pensions or on your Social Security payments, or on whatever keeps body and soul together, may be doing many things the world values but does not pay for: nurturing your grandchildren, volunteering at various organizations, silently and invisibly spending your days praying and intending. None of these are paid for, usually. None may be said to be valued by the world, if value is measured by willingness to pay money or services or anything tangible beyond gratitude at most. Yet they are valued by those who know, and they produce satisfaction in themselves even if no one else knows or cares.
So, an encouragement for us to expand our imaginations to include things we might never have thought of, or might have dismissed as impractical or unimportant.
Yes. It is worthwhile to recall and relive the elasticity of your youth: It will not bring with it the sense of lostness it once did. You have lived one or two things since then; you know better who and what you are, who and what you want to be. Even, to a degree, who and what you have to be, by your nature and inclination.
I wish I had not wasted so many years in which I could have written my appreciation for Thoreau’s sense of the world. Repeatedly I see that he and Emerson – and Alcott – saw life more clearly than is known even yet, because people pay too much attention to their clothing – that is, to the fact that they were New England men of the 1800s – and not enough attention to the fact that they were, as we are, traveling gods in disguise. That’s what Henry called us, and he was not wrong in that.
Well, speaking of fluidity and hardening, there is no real reason for you to become what they call “practical” in your old age. You can’t know how much time you have. It’s mostly a matter of what you want to do. This of course aimed not merely at you, but at any and all.
Understood.
No reason not to settle for a shorter session today. You have other things to do; that’s fine.
Well, this seems rounded off nicely, it’s true. Theme?
“Imagining and hardening,” perhaps.
Our thanks for this and all, as always.