“Everyone is engaged in the same kind of creation-by-decision,” my friends say; “that is what human life is.”
[Tuesday, January 17, 2006]
Surely you see that your culture’s way of making you feel guilty about not doing what you want to do, and doing what you don’t want to do, will work only for a certain kind or person, in a certain kind of belief system. So by living it and living it though – or perhaps we should say living through it – you break the way for others who are like you in this.
It is not a universal problem, yours is not a universal answer. But you living your life are addressing or not addressing the problems specific to you; this means also that you are addressing those problems for all others who share that thread or those threads – and they are doing the same, also for all others on the thread. This has nothing to do with publicity or notoriety, nothing to do with schools or schools of thought. Mostly this work is done in private and does not achieve publicity afterward either; nor is it noteworthy, particularly. Should one – or rather should everyone – write journals or publish books or make movies about how they learned to walk, or how their pancreas overcomes specific challenges? You see? Everyone is engaged in the same kind of creation-by-decision; that is what human life is. So the only need (if it is a need; but it is something to do, anyway) is to remind people that this is a way of seeing life.
Your lives right “now” are starved of meaning. This is as it should be (in other words, “all is well”) so that new meanings can come into prepared soil. Yours – and this is addressed to whomever reads this – yours is only one, yet it is one, contribution.
It would not be possible to lead a life that did not affect everyone else, but as that seems too vague and theoretical to you, we will put it another way. It would not be possible to live a life without affecting all the threads one comprises; equally it would be impossible not to be affected by all those threads. It is a metaphor, but not a far-fetched one, that you are all in a web of life in and out of Time-Space. There is no isolation.
Mildly frustrating to us, it is, to know how little our plain words will be felt or even heard. We say to you, “you are not alone,” and you, Frank as an individual at one particular point in your life – are utterly transformed (though as it happens across time-slices the process is not obvious to you, or not so much so). But we say “you are not alone; nothing can exist in isolation” and we know that few who read it will do more than nod vaguely and proceed, not realizing that their lives can be utterly transformed merely by the implications of that statement. This is a key – not the only one, but it is one – to totally re-valuing what they know; most will scarcely notice. Nonetheless, all is well. The frustration, you know, comes not in our wishing something to be done or not done – for elsewhere of course it is or isn’t done – but in seeing that tension between desire and the living-out of consequences. Well, the whole subject – including your mild surprise that we can feel frustration, not to mention your confusion over the whole idea – can wait, perhaps forever.