THOUGHTS:LIFE AS WE KNOW IT

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to. –I have an ordinary life—and though some might think this is dull, I tell you it is sweet. Ordinary life is a miraculous thing. This life has been a test. If this had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do. The trick is to assume your life is going to work out. Of course, it never does, so you do the next best thing: you take it one disaster at a time.  I think depression and despair are reasonable reactions to the nature of life. Life has its ups and downs. It is unreliable and conditional and provisional. It can be, as we used to say in my youth, a real bummer. Failure, disease, death: standard life events. Is it any surprise if some of the time, some of us feel like hell? –

What is life? we ask, knowing that the answer will come not as a headline but as an aggregate. Life is dewclaws and corsages and dust mites and alligator skin and feathers and whale’s whiskers (as mammals, whales do have hair) and tree-frog serenades and foreskins and blue hydrangeas and banana slugs and war dances and cedar chips and bombardier beetles. Whenever we encounter something that is rare, we mentally add it to the seemingly endless list of forms that life can take. We smile in amazement as we discover yet another variation on an ancient theme. To hear the melody, we must hear all the notes. When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady’s slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our sense like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

Life is not just a diurnal property of large interesting vertebrates; it is also nocturnal, anaerobic, cannibalistic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative: cooking away in the warm dark. Life is well maintained at a four-mile ocean depth, is waiting and sustained on a frozen rock wall, is clinging and nourished in hundred-degree desert temperatures. And there is a world of nature on the decay side, a world of beings who do rot and decay in the shade. Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good. …sometimes it’s moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. –ditto

When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life. We begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy.  Living fully doesn’t necessarily mean that you cram your day full of activity or go climb Everest or become the next Mother Teresa. It could just mean taking pleasure in who you are at this moment, making full use of all of your senses. Just breathe. Stretch. Notice beauty and laughter. Feed yourself—figuratively and literally—because you’re hungry for life again and because, well, who doesn’t love to eat? I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it’s only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you’re time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

He thought that a lifetime was just like a day of watching television. In the early hours there was a sequence—nursery programmes followed by school serials. After that it became a jumble—a comedy half-hour and then a drama full of sex or murder; a boring stretch that seemed to go on for ever in which people did nothing but talk nonsense; an interlude of romance; more mayhem, more boredom, then nothing. Life is just a dream on the way to death.Life is so only-once, so single-chanceish! It all depends on your arranging and synchronizing it so that when opportunity knocks you’re right there waiting with your hand on the doorknob. There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country…Life is unfair. Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

There’s something I would like to understand. And I don’t think anyone can explain it... There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that it’s something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it’s like a sacred treasure. Now it’s over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone, and it isn’t that they are indifferent, it’s just that they don’t know, they don’t know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there’s something about it that they should understand. I don’t understand it myself, but there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What? I wanted a perfect ending... Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what is going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. [Life:] You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.

Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective, this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We’re looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope’s lens. However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

The art of contentment is the recognition that the most satisfying and the most dependably refreshing experiences of life lie not in great things but in little. The rarity of happiness among those who achieved much is evidence that achievement is not in itself the assurance of a happy life. The great, like the humble, may have to find their satisfaction in the same plain things. If you mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,This is the best season of your life.It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all. There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness.

Epiphanies like these are so much more likely to occur for me in grocery stores and laundromats, rather than in the more traditional places of reverence and prayer. They are moments in which the baseline about what is good and important in my life changes. Often they come just when it feels like life has played another rotten trick on me and nothing in my life is ever going to go as I expect. Through these hardships comes the realization that it is in the most ordinary aspects of my life—the ones in which everything can, and does, go wrong—that I am offered glimpses of the extraordinary. In these flashes of insight, I understand for a moment that one of the great dividends of darkness is an increased sensitivity to light. And in these rare and expansive moments, I am called to delight. Life is like a box of chocolates. It’s a cheap thoughtless perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you ever get back is another box of chocolates, so you’re stuck with unidentifiable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing left to eat. Sure, once in a while there’s a peanut butter cup or an English toffee, but they’re gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you’re desperate enough to eat that, all you have left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappings.