Reflections Of...

   The way life used to be...ah, remember that?  For some reason, I've been reading three books dealing with just that, authors looking back and reflecting, not only on their lives but on what happened with their lives.  One tried suicide (twice), one became a mammoth best-selling writer, one got married and considered her life "ordinary."  But guess what?  Just like all of us there was much for them to say, much to digest, and much to think about and relate to.  Here's the dust jacket cover to Teresa Jordan's book, The Year of Living Virtuously, Weekends Off: Benjamin Franklin was in his early twenties when he embarked on a “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,” intending to master the virtues of temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.  He soon gave up on perfection but continued to believe that these virtues, coupled with a generous heart and a bemused acceptance of human frailty, laid the foundation for not only a good life but also a workable society.  Writer and visual artist Teresa Jordan wondered if Franklin’s perhaps antiquated notions of virtue might offer guidance to a nation increasingly divided by angry righteousness.  She decided to try to live his list for a year, focusing on each virtue for a week at a time and taking weekends off to attend to the seven deadly sins.  The journal she kept became this collection of beautifully illustrated essays, weaving personal anecdotes with the views of theologians, philosophers, ethicists, evolutionary biologists, and a whole range of scholars and scientists within the emerging field of consciousness studies.  Though she claims to never have aspired to moral perfection, she was still surprised, as was Benjamin Franklin before her, “to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined.”   In just one section (this one on anger) she writes: Of the seven sins, anger is the one that frightens me most, and also the one to which I am most in thrall.  My anger is of the controlled and mostly unexpressed sort, though it leaks out in grumpiness and scowls and bouts of sullen resistance...The brief insanity of rage is a sort of schizophrenia: we are unrecognizable to ourselves and to others...who among us hasn't at some time wanted --whether we acted on it or not-- to scream at the child who won't stop crying or talking or kicking the back of our seat on an over-crowded airplane?  And then, when we come to our sense and take account of the monster that sprang from within like the beast out of the womb of "Alien," we realize that our rage was really directed at the universe that failed to organize itself to our avail.  In the movies, the character who experiences a great flash of insight receives the keys to the kingdom.  The marriage heals, the business thrives, the children come back with love in their hearts and children of their own.  In real life, it's different.

    Then came Gift From the Sea, the classic best-seller by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, an author oft quoted.  In her opening she wrote:  I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships.  And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started naturally to write.  I had the feeling, when the thoughts first clarified on paper, that my experience was very different from other people's.  (Are we all under that illusion?).  My situation had, in certain ways, more freedom than that of most people and in certain other ways, much less.  Besides, I thought, not all women are searching for a new pattern of living, or want a contemplative corner of their own.  Many women are content with their lives as they are.  They manage amazingly well, far better than I, it seemed to me, looking at their lives from the outside.  With envy and admiration, I observed the porcelain perfection of their smoothly ticking days.  Perhaps they had no problems, or had found the answer long ago,  No, I decided, these discussions would have value and interest only for myself.  But as I went on writing and simultaneously talking with other women, young and old, with different lives and experiences --those who supported themselves, those who wished careers, those who were hard-working housewives and mothers, and those with more 
ease-- I found that my point of view was not unique.  In varying settings and under different forms, I discovered that many women, and men, too, were grappling with essentially the same questions as I, and were hungry to discuss and argue and hammer out possible answers.  Even those whose lives had appeared to be ticking imperturbably under their smiling clock-faces were often trying, like me, to evolve another rhythm with more creative pauses in it, more adjustment to their individual needs, and new and more alive relationships to themselves as well as others.  Twenty years later, she would write about the book: The world has totally changed in twenty years and so, of course, have the lives of every one of us, including my own.  When I wrote "Gift From the Sea," I was still in the stage of life I called "the oyster bed," symbol of a spreading family and growing children.  The oyster bed, as the tide of life ebbed and the children went away to school, college, marriage, or careers, was left high and dry.  A most uncomfortable stage followed, not sufficiently anticipated and barely hinted at in my book.  In bleak honesty it can only be called "the abandoned shell."  Plenty of solitude, and a sudden panic at how to fill it, characterize this period.  With me, it was not a question of simply filling up the space or the time.  I had many activities and even a well-established vocation to pursue.  But when a mother is left, the lone hub of a wheel, with no other lives revolving around her, she faces a total re-orientation.  It takes time to re-find the center of gravity.  All the inner and outer exploration a woman has done earlier in life pays off when she reaches the abandoned shell.  One has to remember that Anne Morrow Lindbergh published her book in 1955 (although 50th anniversary copies of the book are still available online and in stores).

   And finally a book by Hiroyuki Itsuki, Tariki.  The soon to be 86-year old author began his book this way: When I wake up in the middle of the night, I often find myself asking what it was that has kept me going up to now, that has kept me alive.  Is there anything that I really believe in?  The troubles of daily life often attack in an uninterrupted flurry, one after another: health problems; the first signs of old age; all sorts of difficulties with work and relationships, with family or children.  Anxiety and restlessness, self-hate and unfocused anger, apathy and resignation, mark our days.  Our daily lives are a simmering stew of their ingredients, and sometimes I am impressed, in a rueful way, that I have kept going all these decades.  Human beings are really very tough.  And then there are the larger crises that each of us faces in the course of our lives.  These are events that overturn our whole world.  We succumb to life-threatening illnesses.  We lose our reputation, social standing, and work in a single blow.  Our children suffer blows in their lives and we find there is nothing we can do to alleviate their pain.  There are times when we must face not just unemployment but personal bankruptcy...All of us live with death close, but silent, at our side, easy to ignore if we choose to.  Suicide is not an aberration but a recognition and embrace of death, a hand extended to claim it.  Tossing away one's life is as easy as turning to acknowledge our silent companion.  Some, I'm sure, choose death for no reason other than that their lives become too much trouble.  Yet, all of us exist on the edge of a precipice that separates life from death.  Most of us, however, never look down...Of course, I've had a vague feeling that there is some kind of "Other Power" for a long time. "Tariki" is the Japanese word for Other Power.  His book, subtitled "Embracing Despair, Discovering Peace,"  won Book of the Year at his publisher in Japan.  In describing a bit of Itsuki's book about Pure Land Buddhism, Google wrote: Unlike Zen, which flourished in remote monasteries, Pure Land (that is that "...the difficult practice of attaining enlighten-
ment...could be made easy") thus became the form of Buddhism practiced by common people, the householders.

   So I couldn't help but notice that there was a common theme here, a magnet of words pulling thoughts together that seem to be floating above us throughout our lives.  But why now, why suddenly three books --some older, some newer-- that would land in my lap at virtually the same time?  And why would I pick not one up, but all three, even though none of them were together or appeared on the shelf on the same day?  Was something more going on, an "other power?"  Well, yes and no, for something did indeed happen in my life, a life-changing event as all three authors put it...but that will have to wait because indeed, like life, I've yet to finish what's right in front of me.  And as the authors seem to be noting, why would others care anyway?  The views ahead are so beautiful, there is so much to see; but if there is indeed a precipice it might be time to start looking at my feet and to watch where I'm going...