Day 29

Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.

C. G. Jung

My skin prickles. The air is still, very still, holding its breath. There is a tension and a waiting; the world gathers itself in preparation for what is to come. And what is to come? Not a storm from the appearance of the sky. Simply life, unfolding. There are goose bumps on my arms and I am shivering slightly, though not from cold. It is hard to sit still. It is hard to wait.

I am awed by the absolute fragility of life. It is hard for my mind to grasp the fact of such abundant life on this planet, when the chance of being alive at all seems so very small. Having seen how vulnerable fledglings are in the days after they first leave their nests, it is a wonder to me that any survive at all. And yet everywhere birds are calling, soaring through this beautiful sky as though it were a playground. And perhaps it is. One with the safety features switched off. One with no guarantees.

The sun I greet so reverently each morning delivers burns and cancers as easily as it delivers warmth and joy. The beautiful ocean, surging and receding, that I love to feel playing at my ankles at the very edge of its existence, is a killer. Regularly it swallows people whole, mostly tourists who underestimate its powers with its hidden rips and currents. And occasionally, a great white shark finds a meal.

Once upon a time, a single cut could lead to slow and painful death. And now, in the era when antibiotics are beginning to fail us, who knows? Perhaps we will soon be back there again. Back in a time when the slightest misfortune could result in death. Time is indeed not linear and we can travel backwards as easily as we can travel forwards. One of my heroines, Helen Keller, once wrote:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

A daring adventure. What courage it requires to face the world on our own terms, knowing that if we do so, it may all be over in a moment. Or irrevocably changed. That thought makes my skin crawl as much as the electricity in the air. “Leap, and the net will appear,” says author Julia Cameron. But will it? Will it truly? For so many, in so many ways and times, it does not. Disease. Famine. War. Atrocities of every kind. But perhaps she is not wrong. Perhaps life is larger than we assume and understand it to be. Perhaps what we see as disaster and devastation are not final at all, but merely points that must be travelled through in order to come to something greater. Everywhere Nature tells us that life evolves in a cycle and that we must allow ourselves to disintegrate in order to be rebuilt. We use this knowledge symbolically to remind ourselves that there are many “little deaths”. Deaths of relationships, deaths of projects, deaths of whole ways of thinking and believing, deaths of a way of life. All of them require that we let go of all that we are and know, in order that something new may come. We like to think “new and better”, but is any part of our journey “better” than any other part? We know only that we must submit to the cycle and allow it to be played out, over and over, in our lives. Sometimes painful, sometimes joyous, sometimes merely with exhaustion or relief. But always it plays out. There is a French poem by Edmond Haraucourt, known as the “Song of Farewell” that goes something like this:

Rondel de l’adieu

Partir, c'est mourir un peu,

C'est mourir à ce qu'on aime:

On laisse un peu de soi-même

En toute heure et dans tout lieu.

C'est toujours le deuil d'un vœu,

Le dernier vers d'un poème;

Partir, c'est mourir un peu,

C'est mourir à ce qu'on aime.

Et l'on part, et c'est un jeu,

Et jusqu'à l'adieu suprême

C'est son âme que l'on sème,

Que l'on sème en chaque adieu:

Partir, c'est mourir un peu.

It means something like this:

To leave is to die a little,

To be lost to all we love:

We leave a little of ourselves

In every place and hour.

It is each time a mourning,

The last line of a poem;

To leave is to die a little,

To be lost to all we love.

We leave and it is a game,

And until the very last farewell,

It is our spirit that we plant,

That we leave behind with each farewell.

To leave is to die a little.

Haraucourt seems to assume, like most of us, that there is a final farewell, a last parting. But what if, as in the Tarot deck, death is merely part of the journey, endlessly repeated in infinite ways and forms? And what if the daring adventure takes us, not to the possibility of the end of existence, but merely to the end of who we are now, as part of an unending journey? The world truly is not safe and it contains as much pain as wonder. But I am learning that to seek the safe path is not to live at all. And perhaps that is the true death. Perhaps Death is much less terrifying than the death of being afraid to live. Gandalf, my favourite wizard (via his author, J. R. R. Tolkien), said that we do not get to choose the times in which we live. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” And perhaps that is the daring adventure Helen Keller talks about. We cannot create the fantasies of our imagination, in which there is no pain or death, only perfect, unending stagnation that never evolves. To us it is given to decide how we will respond to the question of life.

In this month’s edition of O Magazine, Martha Beck wrote that “Weirdly, we feel uncomfortable when things get ‘too good’”. She said that we seem to assume that there is only so much good fortune our lives can contain. It’s like we have a budget, and if we spend too much, the other shoe will fall and we invite disaster. She talks of “happiness scales” that we set for ourselves. We get to calibrate them for ourselves and we tend to calibrate them very low. Her thesis reminds me of an episode of Sliders I remember, when, in one parallel universe, the friends find themselves in a world in which money is handed out free. But it’s a gamble, like a kind of perverse lottery. The more money you take the more you can buy. But each dollar is a ticket in the lottery of population control. If you “win”, you die, so that the world’s resources can continue to sustain a high standard of living for a sufficiently small population.

And that, Martha Beck would appear to be saying, is essentially what we believe, every day. We believe that the more we allow good fortune into our lives, the more we flirt with disaster. But there is no end to the amount of good fortune we can have. There is no budget, and no grim lottery. The simple key is non-attachment. Nothing can be “grasped” and permanently held. We do not get to indefinitely keep anything we take from life’s offerings, so it does not help to think “I’ve had my share”. It doesn’t work that way. There is only an ever-shifting stream of life, like a rain shower, and as we stand in it, we can either put up an umbrella or stand with open arms and upturned faces, allowing its bounty to stream down upon us. The thing that makes “lucky” people different, according to her position, is that they have a different imaginary budget in their minds. Or perhaps no budget at all. These people have more “luck” because they allow themselves to have it. They allow themselves to recognise and be open to every moment of good fortune, without fear that they are being too greedy and taking too much. They are the grateful recipients of life’s no-strings bounty.

That may be true but there’s a whole side to this she never mentioned in her article. We admonish ourselves not to cut ourselves off from pain because the more we deaden our ability to experience pain the more we deaden our capacity for joy. But that statement works equally in reverse, though we tend not to linger on that fact. The more we open ourselves to joy, the more we open ourselves to pain and grief and suffering. That’s the deal. All or none. Which choice shall we make? There is a price to pay, either way.

And so I understand why people are afraid to open themselves to blessings in their lives. Irrational though it may be, it’s like we make a bargain with Life. If I agree not to take too much that is good, will you (Life) agree not to give me too much that is awful? Because Life is capable of delivering horror beyond imagining, and how many of us are brave enough to risk it all? We hope, perhaps, that if we remain “sensible” and do not stick our necks out, we will be safe. Or as safe as it is possible to be. It doesn’t matter that it is an illusion. We have put on our blinkers and try to create for ourselves a world that is fair. I have heard people say, “I kept a really strict diet and did lots of exercise all my life. Why did I get the heart attack when I did everything I was supposed to do?” So science comes up with a new way to make sense and fairness out of it all. It talks about genetic predisposition, and says that the person with the heart attack should be happy because if he hadn’t kept to that strict diet and exercise regime, he would probably have died. It was his strict habits that saved him. And perhaps that is all completely true, but it is also a way to reinforce the idea that if you play by the rules, you win. And I suspect it isn’t anything like as neat as that at all.

Kahlil Gibran wrote that joy and sorrow are inseparable and that “the lute that soothes your spirit [is] the very wood that was hollowed with knives”.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

…

Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.

Martha Beck would have us be open and trusting, allowing infinite opportunity for joy and abundance to enter our lives. What she is not saying is that the deal includes opening ourselves to infinite opportunity for experience of every kind to enter our lives. But as Gibran points out, the alternative is emptiness. It is the emptiness of standstill. Of stagnation. Of nothingness. Which is life? Which death?

If we open ourselves to all the happiness that may choose to come our way, then we must equally open ourselves to pain, suffering, death. We must, in the final analysis, be equally open to death as to life. And we must surrender to the knowledge that how we might choose life to be may not be what the universe holds for us at all. That is what non-attachment really means.

As I stand in the creative flow of the universe, I find that I am afraid of more than all the horrors that out there lie. I am afraid that if I open myself fully, I will find that what the universe really wants is for me to stop being “selfish”, stop being myself, and go back to being a “good” and “sensible” person who does what others tell her to do. In other words, I am afraid that it will ask me to choose emptiness. I am afraid that if I trust the universe to guide me, I will lose everything. I am afraid I will lose myself.

But I cannot hold on to yesterday and it would not help me even if I could. To hold on would be to repeat; only through letting go can I allow new thoughts, new ideas, new worlds to flow. They will not have the magic of yesterday’s thoughts; perhaps they will have no magic at all. But at least they will acknowledge that in each day I begin again, with no firm foundations beneath my feet, only the desire to more forward into the unknown. That’s something we rarely choose to contemplate, that we are all standing at the very edge of the cliff, preparing to leap off. We create as many safeguards as we can; we build in our monotonous predictability. But it is all an illusion. With every step, every word, we break new ground and come face to face with the Wheel of Fortune. Where now?

Do I have the courage to face that truth? Can I really, with Peter Pan (via J. M. Barrie), face the enormity that is Life with the conviction that “To die will be an awfully big adventure”?