To Be...or Not

      Here's are some lyrics I wrote one evening, and don't ask me why; sometimes it just happens.  Each of us may get a thought or an idea and mostly, we just let them slide away into the nether.  But for some reason I felt the need to jot this down (on a side note, I was listening to Al Stewart's love song, The Year of the Cat, and felt that this rewrite fit better in my life): Well the clock struck one, was the end of fun, for the older person inside you; behind the curtain you were never certain that you ever knew.  On the distant shores you kept wanting more, as if the seas were yours alone; watching the waves rise till they lost the sky...you were all alone.  Your parents left, now you're fifty-three and the feeling's strange.  So the path was clear, now it's disappeared, like you stepping off to the unknown.  So many others, far behind, but you feel alone.  The next morning even I had to ask myself, what was that all about?  Perhaps it was a subconscious blip of Dante: Midway in our life's journey, I went astray / from the straight road and woke to find myself / alone in a dark wood.

     Life's stepping stones, the ones we easily ignore and jump over when we were younger and full of vitality and distractions, are now appearing a bit more colorful and more attractive as if causing me to pause and take notice at the many pebbles scattered everywhere in front of me.  I must admit that a few of these came unexpectedly in my life, as if a bird or a flyer being blown off course and narrowly missing your face, you instinctively swatting it away and yet having it cause you to turn and look and perhaps catch something you never noticed just across the way.  The first of these was a CD set from the library, a collection of NPR interviews from nearly a decade ago titled People We Meet.  There were many personalities, some of them now passed away; but each showed such resilience and traits that it leaves one with a renewed faith in our diversity.  Sir Terry Pratchett was one of the people featured, a prolific author of science fiction* who, when asked if he fears the unknown replied, "oh no, I treasure the unknown."  Another person was Ingrid Betancourt, running for president of Columbia at the time who was captured by FARC rebels; after several attempts to escape her jungle setting, they chained her by the neck to a tree where she was required to ask for everything...water, food, even to urinate.  She remained a prisoner in the jungle for six and a half years.  

     Another person on the NPR podcast was a teen caught in the Serb/Bosnian war who continued to ask, "...what for?  You know they send out the young men to fight, even my brother.  What for?"  It echoed the comment made by my friend who summed up his view of growing up by saying that he never expected our Boomer generation --the one that fought in Vietnam and had Watergate and Woodstock and peace & love & hippies-- to turn out to be so extremely divided some 50 years later, with the emphasis on the word "extreme."   This was summed up well by cartoonist Dan Perkins (better known as Tom Tomorrow) when he featured a time traveler from 1977 appearing in our future and perhaps expecting to see some of the major changes that our "peace-loving" generation had accomplished:      

       We keep fighting and fighting --over Ukraine, over Taiwan, over water, over oil, over voting, over women's bodies, over skin color, over religion-- and as the teen in Sarajevo asked so many decades ago, what for?  Smithsonian magazine had a piece on sculptor Sabin Howard who is creating the 60-foot bronze frieze that will adorn the memorial to the Great War; it was an interesting piece and helped readers to not only see the challenge facing the artist, but to also remember why WWI was called The Great War: The Great War changed everything.  It rewrote global treaties.  It redrew the Middle East.  It hastened a revolution in Russia.  It moved the United States --reluctant and isolationist-- to the center of the world stage.  It solved the problems of the 19th century by creating the problems of the 20th.  As the last act of the Industrial Revolution, it industrialized killing.  It was an inglorious, mechanized war wrapped in the Victorian language of valor.  So it was little wonder then that one reader wrote in to the editor: I wonder if a display of World War I’s real horrors might be more fitting.  The broken bodies, the human limbs scattered throughout the mud-soaked trenches, the soldiers reclining on the corpses of their comrades, the shredded dead suspended on barbed wire and the shattered psyches that came home might make for a more useful memorial, not to war but to its folly.  Honoring those who died does not require that we ignore the madmen who sent a generation into the slaughterhouse called the Great War.  And we again have to ask, what for?

     There is much we cannot understand, not only of what makes us human but what makes the world around us tick...what, in other words, is life itself?  If you haven't been humbled by NASA's 209 Seconds video (appropriately subtitled, That Will Make You Question Your Entire Existence), then now might be a good time. But step back a few centuries and imagine that you're a mathematician/ physicist from the 15th century, a man named Evangelista Torricelli, and you announce to the world that the air all around us --everywhere-- has weight (a theory first proposed, but inaccurately, by Galileo).  Here's how 747 pilot Mark Vanhoenacker described it in his book, Skyfaring: Imagine a cube of ordinary sea-level air, a yard on each side.  It weighs about 2 pounds -- about the same as a liter or quart of water...Little in daily life suggests that the air weighs down upon me as matter-of-factly as water rests on the bottom of an aquarium; that each day i awake and stand up and walk through insensible thickness....when we fly we confront many of our earthbound assumptions that would otherwise remain as unchallenged as the apparent emptiness of the air itself.  There is a reason airliners have devices called air data computers. A pilot must learn to speak of at least four kinds of speed, and several more of temperature, distance, and altitude.  These aren't questions of terminology or curiosities that appear only at the extremes of experience.  They are the truths of the medium that sustains us truths revealed to us by flight.

     "Our earthbound assumptions."  We all tend to march through life as if little will change, that all is right in the world until it isn't.  The sound from the car, that pain in your stomach, that power going out, that fire growing larger and larger.  AARP did a piece on caretakers, ordinary people who watched their lives change as the lives of those they loved changed.  It too was difficult to understand.  Here was just one person featured: Jeanie Olinger (61; she has overseen care full-time for her 37-year-old son in Longview, Texas, since his 2008 car accident.  She also cared for her aunt at home and in a nursing home until her aunt’s death last September): I remember going for a walk as they bathed Chris at the hospital.  He was 24 and had suffered brain injuries they said would be permanent.  I realized this was going to be a long journey but I committed to it.  In that instant, I let go of whatever I thought the future looked like.  Said Amy Goyer, a caregiver for over 40 years ("I’m the youngest of four girls, I wasn’t married, I didn’t have children, I worked in health care.  It was only natural that when an older relative needed help putting up a Christmas tree or fixing an old Victrola, I’d say, 'I’ll just go check on things.' "): It’s interesting.  When my father died some people immediately said, “You must be so relieved.”  I was deeply offended by that.  The truth is, I missed him.  I still do.  All the hospital stays, all the troubles, all the messes, you name it.  Daddy was still wonderful to be with.  He was my dad and the essence of him was still there.  It wasn’t until he died that I realized how important taking care of him had been.  It gave me purpose.  Some people think caregiving is putting your life on hold.  I disagree.  Caregiving is putting the fullest part of yourself to work.

     Such selflessness, such devotion and compassion seems as difficult to understand as an urge to hurt or to kill for a "leader's" words or a court ruling.  What has helped me to see a tiny sliver of the bigger picture has been a few stories taken from The Little Zen Companion.  One story went this way: Wealthy patrons invited Ikkyu to a banquet.  Ikkyu arrived dressed in his beggar's robes.  The host, not recognizing him, chased him away.  Ikkyu went home, changed into his ceremonial robe of purple brocade, and returned.  With great respect, he was received into the banquet room.  There, he put his robe on the cushion, saying, "I expect you invited the robe since you showed me away a little while ago," and left.  Another story went this way: Two monks were once traveling together down a muddy road.  A heavy rain was falling.  Coming around the bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.  "Come on, girl," said the first monk.  Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.  The second monk did not speak again until the night when they reached the lodging temple.  Then he could no longer restrain himself.  "We monks don't go near females," he said.  "It is dangerous.  Why did you do that?"  "I left the girl there," the first monk said.  "Are you still carrying her?"

      Letting go, and seeing what matters.  A church down the way had a yard sale fundraiser and welcomed donations.  Many of the items that filled the gym were indeed yard sale items, things you'd find at a neighbor's garage sale.  Stored away in my room were items left from projects I'd done, all of them packaged and sealed but no longer being sold in stores.   So I bundled up a box of my books (100), a box of my games (24) and an entire rack of my greeting cards encompassing some 30 leftover designs complete with envelopes (nearly 1000 cards total).  Could they use them, I asked?  Sure said the director, many of the early buyers were small shop owners themselves, he said; I'll sell the cards as a set, rack and all, he said.  And as I left, I heard him tell a co-worker, "make me a tag for $35."  

      It’s easy to get lost in the churn of deadlines, notifications, meetings and chores, wrote Jennifer Sahn, newly arrived as the editor-in-chief of High Country News.  We bounce from one demand to another, and when we finally come up for air, we wonder where all the time goes.  Once a year, I take it upon myself to generate a different kind of to-do list, one that I can come back to often to make sure I haven’t lost sight of what really matters — the things by which we measure a life.  This year’s list goes something like this: Experience wonder as often and as deeply as possible.  Find places that make your heart sing.  Take care of your people, your community, your compatriots.  Use only what you need.  Measure your decisions by how much justice and joy they generate in the world.  Take care of the land — the big open spaces and the intimate close-knit ones.  Navigate with grace, yielding when necessary and surmounting obstacles that would keep you from staying true to yourself.  Keep good company.  Help those in need.  Release your worries and fears, and indulge in what makes you feel confident and strong.  Find your center, look around, breathe in.  Respect plant life.  Admire animals.  Worship rocks.  Take a stand for what you believe in.  Make time to hit reset, re-evaluate, and come back always to the land, for the land is what sustains us, home to both our short-sighted mistakes and our deepest aspirations.  Practice kindness and compassion.  Give more than you take.  Be a good human.

     One more cartoon to end, this being one of my more enjoyable ones (so much so that I framed it) from the late Charles Schultz of Peanuts.  Just as with a Zen story, it narrows things down to how each of us see the world, even if slightly shaped and skewed by our past.  Fighting and compassion, the quest for riches or the quest for kindness.  It pretty much comes down to just 209 seconds, a timescale of our lives and what we believe is our importance in it, summed up by Sir Isaac Newton: I don't know what I may seem to the world.  But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

*Sir Terry Pratchett's 46 books have sold over 85 million copies and were rivaled only by his imagination.  In his later years he developed a rare form of Alzheimer's that slowly took away his vision and his depth of field, along with his short term memory; yet he couldn't resist the pull of writing more and kept doing so by dictating with speech recognition software.  Sir Terry Pratchett passed away on March 15, 2015...

--Copyright notice: both Tom Tomorrow's and the late Charles Schultz's cartoons are subject to copyright and are used gratefully in this post under the Guidelines for Fair Use: A majority of the content you post must be your own. Give credit to the copyright holder. Don't make money off of the copyrighted work.