Complete Presence

The other day, through the demanding wizardry of Google photos, I saw a picture of my grandson a year ago, when he was seven months old. I was surprised at how much like a baby he looked. And I remembered that at the time the photo was taken, though of course I knew he was a baby, I did think of him as a baby. He was just Isaiah to me. I mean, I knew that he was little and rather incompetent in a number of areas, but being with him, I was most aware of the fullness of his presence as he engaged in his endless explorations of life. 100% alive.

Now that he’s definitely a toddler—running around, digging in whatever dirt he can find, learning new words daily, (yesterday ‘duck’ replaced ‘gaga’ as the referent to the white aquatic bird that says ‘quack’) and almost always sporting at least one band-aid on his knees as evidence of his exuberance—I feel the same completeness about him. To me, he is definitely not some smaller version of who he will become. He is fully himself.

Of course, I’m thrilled and amazed by his ongoing learning. Being with him (and with any young human being) is to witness the capacity of us human beings to grow into a physical and symbolic world of extraordinary complexity. I could sit for hours and watch him play with his three wooden wheeled ‘trains’. They travel as a set and each one explores the edges of his environment. Going back and forth, they slowly then quickly traverse the various transition points in the room: where one carpet meets the other, from the arm of the couch to the floor, the corner of where the flat top of a table becomes the vertical side. Over and over, with great absorption, he studies the problem. And I journey along with him—wondering what is going on in his mind, seeing his incremental improvement in motor skills and understanding and marveling at his delight in the ever-expanding world in which he finds himself.

Every new skill, new word, new behavior meets with great delight from his ‘Baba’. (That’s my semi-made-up name for Granddad.) I’m reminded of a city-wide task force on enhancing resilience in young people that I was part of many years ago. One of the directors of a large youth-serving non-profit summed up the current research on what young people need for healthy development when he said: ‘Every child needs someone who thinks they are the greatest thing since Moby Dick.’ Well, I am certain that Isaiah fits into this category.

We human beings seem to grow and learn best when we are fully appreciated right where we are. The point is not who young people will become when they grow up. I suspect that this applies to grown-ups as well as to knee-huggers. Though we may wish our colleagues, bosses, students and partners were a little wiser and more mature, the best way to support their natural learning and growth is to appreciate them right where they are. So I try to learn from my time with my grandson to delight in the world as it is and to treasure whatever and whoever is right in front of me.

Learning and growing are the nature of being alive. Other than paying attention, very little extra effort is required. Something is always happening and we don’t even have to know what it is. Isaiah has no awareness of the position of being ‘a toddler’. He doesn’t need to and can’t possibly know (nor can I) what will happen next. He is already fully competent to be present in his life. Like all of us, he needs a little help with some of the aspects of life he hasn’t yet mastered. But like all of us, he lives his full life in each moment. My job is not to help him grow up, but to meet and support and delight in him right where he is.

Mission accomplished!

Working Problems

My computer is not feeling well. Or it may be feeling quite well and just be engaged in a work slow-down action. Perhaps a protest against these early mornings? It was one thing when the sun was up, but now in mid-September might as well be the middle of the night when we begin to write. Perhaps my computer has reported me to the Labor Relations Board for violating some unspoken agreement about working hours between computers and humans. Or perhaps it’s trying to teach me a lesson about who’s in charge. Or it might be something to do with how Word doesn’t quite work right on this laptop and doesn’t close documents properly and when I reboot I often end up with twenty or thirty documents piled on top of each other that I have to sort through to find out which is the most current version of each.

Whatever the cause, things are not normal this morning. I tried closing programs and documents. Everything was very slow. Word documents were not willing even to be moved around without a great delay (which leads me toward the work slow-down theory). At first, even the words I typed onto this current document were hesitating before they came onto the page. Now it’s better. Maybe it was just a sleepiness thing?

Funny how the mind loves to make associations. Poetry and science are both products of this wondrous and troublesome human necessity. We observe something and we immediately tap into what we ‘know’ about it. Where does this event fit into the world as I know it? The mind instantly filters and shapes what it sees to find how this fits into the ongoing puzzle of my world.

One perspective says that poets make stuff up while scientists observe what is actually there. But maybe it’s more accurate to talk about different ways to look closely. As I examine my life and the world around me, I am equally interested in the things outside of me and the things inside of me. Perhaps I am most interested in the relationship of the two. How is it that I see and understand? What do I understand? Who even does this ‘understanding’ I speak of?

Scientists do tend to favor uncovering causality. Mere description is not as interesting as what leads to what? How does this happen?   The proximity of two events does not prove that one causes the other. But can we do experiments that might lead to more certainty about the relationship between two different things? Can we say with some degree of certainty that every time x happens y follows? We humans deeply reassured by the predictability of causality.

Gardening is a causality practice. I buy packets of seed with specific names that go with specific pictures I have seen on-line or in my head or in my garden. French Sophia marigold seeds produce small ruffled pom-poms of deep variegated orange and gold, not the silky powder blue funnels of morning glories. I count on this dependable world. Plant the seeds under the right conditions, give them water, sunlight and good soil, and voila – the intricate and wondrous blossoms are just like the pictures.

Gardening reaffirms my sense that the world is reliable and predictable. The results of the upcoming Presidential election are not in this category, nor is what will happen in this polarized and angry country when the election results are announced. Just turning my mind to the reality of this uncertainty, I feel unsettled and slightly fearful. I’m reminded of my desire to do what I can to nudge the results toward the outcome that I want. (note to self: do something today)

There is so much to observe—both within and without. How to live in the amazing world of causality—to do my part but not get lost in the angst of it all? How to be serious and playful at the same time? Response-able and unencumbered?

I don’t believe that a fixed position will suffice. I tell silly stories about my computer even as I know it’s time to reboot and may even be time to get the assistance of someone who knows more than I do. Still, I try to appreciate my life and its many meanings in the biggest view I can.

Nothing is fixed or needs to be fixed—except maybe my computer.

Metabolizing Pain

Ruth King, in her wonderful book Mindful of Race, writes about the pain and fear that arises around issues of race. Whatever the color of our skin, whatever our racial identity, we all carry deep and unprocessed pain around our individual and collective experience of race. To protect ourselves from this pain we lash out, run out or numb out—King’s memorable take on flight, fight or freeze—our human response to that which feels overwhelming.

King also mentions another protective response she used to use. When walking by white people (King is black), she noticed that she always smiled, often without even being aware of it. Noticing this pattern, she looked deeper into what was happening inside her in the moment. She discovered that her smile came from her fear that if she didn’t smile she would be judged as ‘an angry black woman’ or be harmed in some way. Her smile was a way of managing some danger she instinctively felt.

This kind of automatic defensive response is sometimes called tend and befriend. It’s often associated with women, but it’s one of my most habitual responses to conflict and trauma. I figure if I am nice enough and kind enough and understanding enough, I will be safe and I won’t be attacked.

While all four of these are natural and necessary human survival strategies, none of them deal effectively with the source of the problem. They may allow us to move through a difficult situation, but they also add another layer onto the original problem. Lashing out, walking out, numbing out and ‘nicing’ out all leave the essential pain and conflict untouched. We then carry the unprocessed pain with us in ways that make us more likely to avoid it again next time a similar situation arises.

The poet Robert Bly used the image of a black bag to imagine the cost of all of these things we avoid. He said we are all given a black bag when we are young. When something happens that we don’t want to deal with, we simply put the experience in that bag. At first, it works pretty well. Put it in the black bag and it goes away. But over the years the black bag gets heavier and heavier as more and more gets stuffed into it. Eventually the weight of the bag gets to be so much that we can barely move. There is a cumulative cost of our avoidance strategies.

But there are other ways of meeting the pain and difficulty of our lives. King writes about the possibility of metabolizing pain—the possibility of facing our difficulties directly. This is the essential and paradoxical intention of Zen and mindfulness meditation. The great 9^th century Chinese Zen teacher Linji put it this way: Do nothing!

Linji’s Do nothing! is an invitation to stay right where we are. To feel what we are feeling and sensing without trying to escape into blame or running out or fading out or smiling until it all goes away. Metabolizing pain is possible when we stay with the pain, not the story of the pain, but the experience itself.

Though we rightly try to avoid pain and discomfort, the truth of life is that suffering is unavoidable. While this appears to be one of the problems of life, the Buddha referred to this inevitable pain as the first Noble Truth. The first step in becoming fully human is to stop trying to avoid what we don’t like.

King’s metabolizing pain points to the possibility of not just surviving but of being nourished by that which we have avoided. The black bag contains the life and energy we have avoided. Pain often feels like what separates us from each other. But the pain we feel, what we suffer in small and big ways, is what connects us to ourselves and to the world around us.

Whatever difficulty you are in, other people have experienced this before and even at the moment you are going through your difficulty, there are many other human beings in the world going through a very similar experience. When we can say This is how human beings sometimes feel, there can be a widening field of experience where it’s not so personal. This pain, this difficulty is not just a problem to be managed, but is an integral part of being human.

We often think about ‘growing up’, but like the trees, we also need to grow down—to send our roots deep into the dark soil of life. The difficulties we encounter are what lead us forward to be nourished by what is unseen and unknown. We can learn to stay with our pain without shutting down. Or, as we shut down, we can learn to come back again and again. In staying and returning, we can begin to discover in the pain itself some hidden and essential gift that has the possibility of transforming us and the world around us.

Reading, Sorting and Education

I have always had a love-hate relationship with reading. In elementary school I found reading out loud to be very challenging and I think if it hadn’t been for my brother, I might have been sorted into the lower ability group. I struggled through and eventually got the hang of it. Fortunately for me, my brother was a year ahead of me in school and I almost always got the teachers he had had. He was always good in school. He had (and still mostly has) a mind that can retain facts and theories and then organize and use them appropriately. I never felt that bright, but assumed I was tracked into the ‘smart’ group because my teachers assumed that I had the same natural ability as my brother.

In high school, when it came time to consider what colleges to apply to, I brought my list of Dartmouth, Amherst and Princeton to the guidance counselor who said that although these might be appropriate schools for my brother, I should look into the next tier. American schools are essentially about sorting children into various ability groups. This sorting presents itself as necessary, rational and merit-based, but is actually unnecessary, irrational and privilege-based. And college admissions is the ultimate educational sorting mechanism—the ultimate manner in which the privileged can ensure their privilege passes on to their children. All presented in the guise of a meritocracy.

My father was a small-town church minister and growing up, we didn’t have much money. But he was a ‘professional’ in the community. My mother and her mother with to Smith College and my grandfather had a PhD from Cornell University in soil science. From the time I was twelve years old, a paper-back copy of somebody’s guide to colleges and universities was in permanent residence on the coffee table of my grandparents’ house. My brother and I eagerly poured through it with the same enthusiasm we looked at baseball gloves in the Montgomery Wards’ catalogue.

In the ‘Monkey-Ward’s’ catalogue, there were always three categories of gloves and Louisville Slugger bats and bicycles and the other things we coveted: good, better and best. The best was clearly extravagant and while we were careful to say that we would be happy with good, we figured that better was probably worth the extra money. So we were well-trained in quality ratings and understood that ‘most selective’ meant most desirable.

I loved looking through that catalogue of colleges. The thickness and weight of the book was a reassuring reminder of the wondrous life that lay ahead of me. The exotic names of schools in far places—Occidental, Harvey Mudd, Pomona—had me dreaming of the hidden worlds of promise that would open to me. I carefully studied and read each school’s strengths and considered whether big or small, urban or rural would be best for me.

In my family it was important not to appear inflated in expectation or wants, but it was clearly important to understand the relative positions of these schools and, if possible, get into the ‘best’ one possible. Doing well enough in school to get into one of these schools (on scholarship) was one of the many never spoken assumptions of my upbringing.

I ended up going to Wesleyan University, not a brand-name school at that point, but clearly a ‘quality’ school. I had done an overnight visit to Amherst College and was incredibly impressed that the fraternity house where I was put up was ‘on tap’ 24 hours a day. I even had a half-glass of flat beer one afternoon that tasted like soapy water. This was clearly the good life even if I didn’t quite understand it all yet. But someone told me that if I liked Amherst, I should check out Wesleyan.

Wesleyan changed exposed me to people and ideas far beyond the world in which I grew up. I learned to read enough to get the gist of things and found out that it was not just my brother paving the way for me, but that I had the capacity to absorb and consider new ideas and perspectives.

I actually meant to write this morning about the piles of book that regularly grow in my bedroom where the bookshelves are filled beyond capacity and I still order important books. I’ll never be able to read half of what I would like. I wish I loved sitting and reading more than I do. After half and hour, I get creaky and impatient to move, but I treasure the knowledge and perspective I continue to get from reading. I love the feel of a book in my hand and the thrill of new ideas that spark connections in my head and I underline the important parts and make my notes of agreement and association in the margins.

But I am grateful to my parents and grandparents who did, through this all, instill in me a love of ideas and a curiosity about the world. How can I repay their generosity in supporting me to go into a world beyond their understanding with their blessings and wishes that I might find my way and use my talents to serve this burning world.

On the Dangers of Hearing Only Part of a Radio Show

The other day on radio I heard that everything in the universe is moving away from everything else. I didn’t catch the whole story, but apparently, due to the energy of the big bang, distances between things are increasing. (This explains a lot that I’ve been noticing recently.)

The big bang’s energy of dispersal is countered by the constant and inexplicable force of gravity. It turns out that everything in the universe is attracted to everything else in the universe. (I feel this too sometimes.) The astrophysicist being interviewed went on to talk about one theory that suggests that at a certain point, the energy of the big bang will wear itself out. (Like a small boy who runs around all day will eventually falls asleep). At this point, gravity gains the upper hand and everything will begin coming back together.

This coming back together will not, however, be the Age of Aquarius. Gravity, as its name implies, is not a lighthearted or limited matter. The astral prediction is that the attraction of everything to everything else will eventually collapse all known (and unknown?) universes back into a primordial point. There won’t be much room to move around and real estate will be in short supply.

I suppose it will be a cozy relief from the vast empty stretches of separation that many of us encounter. We’ll be right on top of each other. We’ll be so close, we won’t even need our cell phones. Since we’ll all be the same very very small thing, communication of any sort will be merely a quaint relic of the past. Single cell microbes will be remembered as fairy tale monsters of inconceivable proportion.

Personally, I predict any number of disputes will arise in such crowded conditions. A lot of toes will be stepped on and inappropriate touching will be unavoidable. These disputes will likely try to enlarge themselves but with no legroom, arguing itself will be severely limited. Spring, summer, fall and winter will most likely have to be canceled for to lack of space. Likewise rain and clouds, rivers and oceans. Even the smallest wind will find no place to blow.

Then at some point, within the point, things will get to a point (where they have already been) and everyone will vote for another big bang—another fantastic adventure outward. We’ll be so sick of each other’s bad breath and irritating habits, that anything will be preferable. Of course there will be trepidation—‘What if I get lost?’ ‘What if I forget my way home?’ We’ll do our best to reassure each other. We’ll remind ourselves that gravity stays with us and that we’ll be back together in just a few trillion gazillion years. Then we’ll pack our bags, say farewell and be on our way.