The Ever-Presence of Perfection

Most people believe that perfection can never be a reality, but I believe that it’s always the reality. It seems to me that every present moment is utterly perfect, simply because it is what it has to be. As this current reality right now, the present moment is entirely without fault or defect, which is the definition of “perfection”. I personally may not like this moment the way it is, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is exactly what it must be. I may wish this moment was a happier one for me or for others, but that doesn’t make the moment any less complete the way it is. This moment, and any moment, can’t be anything but what it is, which makes it perfect. This may sound somewhat insensitive, because we all know that a moment can be full of intense discomfort and suffering, which would seem to surely not be a perfect situation. However, I would say, rather, that it’s surely not a happy situation, but still a perfect one. I personally may not enjoy a particular present moment, may not be happy with what’s happening at that moment, but I can still recognize and accept the fact that the moment, right now, is exactly the way it must be. I may not be pleased with this moment, but I can be at peace with it. I can even, perhaps, honor it as another perfect moment in a universe everlastingly full of them. I guess I’m talking about seeing the big picture instead of the small, personal picture. To me, personally, many moments are bothersome, unsatisfactory, and even sometimes excruciating, but in the big picture of the 15 billion-year-old universe, I try to see that each moment is a necessary part of a measureless and harmonious system that has kept itself running smoothly for eons. My personal situation may be sad and even heartbreaking, but the situation of the universe as a whole is always perfect, and I am part of that general perfection. I just have to step back – way back – and get the big, perfect picture.

First written October 14, 2007

Revised November 2012

"The Black Arrow", by Robert Louis Stevenson

I've been enjoying this book for the last week or so, taking special pleasure in Stevenson's wonderfully surprising uses of imagery. He truly loves to give readers clear and colorful pictures, often involving surprising juxtapositions -- flowers next to dead bodies, butterflies hovering over a sleeping forester.  He also has a keen ear for the music of words. His sentences often flow like songs.

Even the Wind and the Sea

 I’m certainly no miracle worker, but I am working hard to help myself understand that all the things surrounding my life are subservient to the spirit inside me. What I have in my heart is stronger, by far, than the sometimes thunderous noises made by the material aspects of life – the persistent worries, the uncertainties about the future, the simple concerns about the next few hours. There’s a life force in me, and in all of us, that’s so astonishing and irresistible it makes me sometimes silently shout at the way it washes over the seemingly tempestuous powers of material things. It’s sometimes called hope, sometimes inner strength, sometimes confidence or just plain sureness and poise, but whatever it’s called, this force carries with it enough power to prevail over any material condition. Even a great wind and sea surrenders to a steadfast inner spirit. The wind may be wondrous in its force, and the waves may be working their wreckage, but there’s a force inside  us that can soothe and send us into the center of the storm with an awe-inspiring stillness. The storm may still roar, but what's in our hearts speaks with a far more imperious quietness, and all seems suddenly -- at least inside us -- silent. 

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Yesterday I met Delycia at the Y after school, as we often do, and we worked out together in the exercise room. I rowed for awhile, pulling as hard as possible while taking pleasure in the cold, gray scene outside -- the silvery water of the cove, the smoky-looking air and clouds, and the homes comfortably collected around the shore. Later, we enjoyed an undisturbed evening at home, helped by a dinner of cold duck, dressing, and steamed broccoli, and garnished with pieces of the sweetest of apple pies. 

A SINGLE STUNNING ENTERPRISE

     I’ve been relaxing more lately, partly because I’m finally starting to understand an essential fact about life. I grew up with the idea that the nature of reality was what might be called "many-ness", but now I see that it’s actually oneness. From my earliest memory, it was impressed upon me -- by family, friends, the media, and the general culture -- that life consists of crowds of distinct people, distinct situations, and distinct ideas, all of which are struggling with each other. Life, as I learned it growing up, was a never-ending free-for-all among limitless ill-disposed and aggressive components. My main occupation, I came to believe, was to keep myself from harm and win as many of the day-to-day disputes as possible. Now, however, in my 8^th decade of trying to assemble some sort of sensible picture of reality, I’ve come to understand that the many-ness view is simply wrong. Instead of being many, the Universe is just one. It’s not a confused collection of dissimilar and disordered physical entities, but rather a single cohesive and harmonious expression of itself. The entire Universe, I see now, is as unified as a single cell. As in a cell, everything that happens in the Universe happens for the good of itself. What this means for me is that I should give up agonizing and struggling, because there’s no other person or thing that’s out to hurt me. In fact, there’s no “other”, period, and no separate me. There’s just the one unified and endlessly successful Universe, of which I, and everyone else, and all of our apparent troubles and tribulations, are a seamless part. We all share in the single, stunning enterprise called Life (of which death is just another essential part), as closely woven with each other as the molecules in a cell. This realization, to me, calls for much more relaxing than struggling.

An Autopilot Life

   It’s become fairly clear to me that I have spent a sizeable portion of my life in a somewhat haphazard, halfhearted state. I’ve been running mostly on autopilot, doing a thousand things each day with very little actual awareness. I’ve gone from task to task like a mindless machine. Day after day I’ve worked through my to-do list the way a factory apparatus produces products. That may sound harsh, but I think it’s accurate. The truth of it hit me especially hard recently when I realized how very little awareness I have of my own body. I’ve had this body for 71 years, and in all that time I have paid little or no attention to how it feels or what it’s doing. When I’ve been sick or in pain, my awareness has switched on, but otherwise I’ve transported my body around like a strange and distant encumbrance. How peculiar, that a person should be an almost total stranger to the body that gives him gifts like eyesight and the smoothness of a steady heartbeat! How odd, that a man should live a fair part of his life with a virtual scarf around his eyes, doing his daily tasks in a mechanized, world-weary way instead of in unceasing thankfulness for the startling life he’s been given! 

A Madcap Mind

     I realize more and more that my thoughts sometimes behave like aimless, impulsive wanderers. At certain times of the day, they stroll around in a desultory manner, messing around with one topic or another for no noticeable reason. When I need to focus my thoughts, I can usually do it fairly well, but in a free moment (as when I’m fixing dinner, for instance) my mind might go from planning something for the summer, to regretting a remark I made yesterday, to wondering why my new neighbor across the street is so silent when he sees me. Like some strange, shiftless person, my brain occasionally seems to ramble around in a completely capricious manner. I’m not worried about this, because it’s the way all minds sometimes work. What bothers me, though, is that I occasionally fall into an old habit of getting carried away by these undisciplined thoughts. Instead of standing back and observing them as amusing but harmless mental imps, I sometimes get completely captured by this disorderly kind of thinking. I can spend many minutes mindlessly swept away by my thoughts, and then “wake up” and wonder where the time went. I guess what I need to learn is to simply stay detached and unemotional about my own thoughts. After all, my thoughts aren’t “me”. They’re simply short-lived phenomena, like the unfurling winds, like birds coasting by, and the best approach to them would be simply observing and appreciating. Instead of getting lost among the roving, often ragamuffin thoughts that come my way, I should just sit back and be surprised by them. 

Detachment

     In school, we teachers often encourage our students to be committed to the particular goals of a class or an assignment, but it might also be helpful to remind the students that un-commitment, or detachment, can be just as important. To use an analogy, if a basketball team is totally committed to using a particular strategy during a game, they might fail to notice when changed conditions in the game warrant a change in the strategy. They would be so focused on employing their prearranged plan that they might miss opportunities to make adjustments and  better penetrate the opponent’s defense. Their complete commitment might actually be their demise. The same thing can happen to students. A writer might be so focused on following her outline for an essay that she fails to notice, as she’s writing, an exciting new direction she could take. Similarly, a reader might be so committed to finding out ‘what happens’ in a novel that he totally misses much of the beauty of the writing. It might be helpful, then, if we teachers encouraged our students to practice the art of detachment – the art, we might say, of pursuing goals but not being controlled by them.If they get the ‘A’ they have set their sights on, fine – but if they don’t, they must be able to free themselves – detach themselves – from that goal and notice the good results that came from the ‘B’. If they commit themselves to travel one road, excellent – but they must always be ready to take a different road if the conditions call for it. There may be a few gold coins at the end of one road, but there may be a treasure at the end of another.