Avoiding Disaster

In a dream, I almost died last night. Melissa and I were in a small plane going to Binghamton, New York, near where I grew up as a boy. I happened to look out the window and noticed that we were very near the ground, flying low over a road where my brother and I used to ride our bikes in the country. In the plane, we were following the road because we were nearly at tree-top level. I assumed the pilot was brining us in for an emergency landing and hoping there was clear ground ahead.

But then we took a sharp left up Twist Run Road. A real road – steep and twisty with stone cliffs (only in the dream) on either side. The plane was trying to follow the curving path of the road to avoid shearing off either of the wings against the rock wall. But it was clear we were going to crash and the only question was whether or not all of us would die? I looked over at Melissa and felt so much gratitude. This is it. I love you, I said and smiled as I looked into her eyes. There was nothing else to be done.

In the dream, I remembered I was in a dream and didn’t want to die in a plane crash so I backed away from the dream so as not to have to go through with it. A moment later, I was walking around the intact wrecked fuselage of the plane with all the other passengers. Miraculously, the pilot had gotten us down safely. We were all in shock, grateful to be alive but stunned by how close we had come to death.

The pilot was walking up and down near the plane deliriously happy that he had saved us all. He kept saying to us I did a terrific job. I got the plane down safely. Didn’t I do a wonderful job? We were grateful for our lives and happily supported his shocked narcissism.

I’ve been reading David Loy’s Ecodharma and yesterday afternoon was the chapter that considered whether or not it is too late to do anything to keep our planet from warming to the point where life as we know it is no longer sustainable. And if it might be too late, why should we do anything. His argument is that though it looks bleak, very bleak, we can’t know for sure and even if we did know nothing would save us, what we do still matters.

Many years ago I was headmaster of a small private high school for a year and a half. I was promoted from part-time art teacher to head in the middle of a crisis that was threatening to close the school. (Artists get chosen for leadership only when things are really bleak.) I worked with a group of parents to raise money and the Board of Trustees narrowly voted to keep the school open. But we didn’t come anywhere near our enrollment goals and the next fall, six months into my glorious leadership experiment, I had to announce the closing of the school.

For the next nine months, we lived with the knowledge that the school was going to close in June. I realized that my job as the leader was to help create meaning in the face of death. Some people said we shouldn’t care and should do whatever we want. It was clear to me, however, that our actions were more important than ever. Since then, I have been keenly conscious of the importance of beginnings and endings.

Of course, we are all living with a death sentence. Life itself is a journey of creating meaning in the face of our certain death. While the awareness of death can be paralyzing or cause us to act out of a self-destructive narcissism, it can also bring a focus and beauty to our lives. Knowing that we are here only briefly, that we and everyone we know will vanish, allows us to appreciate the preciousness of this fleeting life.

And the plane of our biosphere is in danger of crashing. Saying that it doesn’t matter because it will all end someday or that it is all a dream is to deny the wondrous particularity that appears in the form of you and me, the trees and the flowers, the frogs and the crickets. How do we appreciate the dream-like and fleeting quality of life at the same time we work on every level we can to heal our planet and to mend the institutions of our world that are so toxic and violent?

It was just a dream. But the vision of a fiery ending was real to me in the moment and resonates even now on this cool morning in August. So many dreams. So many fears. So many possibilities.

I think of the character Elnor in Star Trek: Picard—a new reboot of the series. He is a trained warrior from a sect whose vows are to only use their skills in service of righteous and hopeless causes. Picard, as usual, is trying to save the universe against overwhelming odds. The young man joins Picard and fights nobly. I won’t tell you what happens but I will let you know there is a season 2 in the works.

Decisions and Elephants

There are some decisions, even important ones, that are easy to make.   In fact, most of the decisions we make are so easy to make that we’re not even aware that we’re making them. Or if we are aware, the choice is so self-evident that we simply know what to do.

I remember reading once about a condition of the brain that rendered it almost impossible to make decisions. As I recall (or as it seems to make sense to me in this moment) the problem that caused this condition was about emotional processing rather than analytic reasoning. While many of us pride ourselves on being reasonable and thoughtful people, it turns out that our unconscious emotions and intuitions are mostly running the show. Our conscious reasoning most often arises after the decision is already made.

One alarming study demonstrated that the conscious intention to move arises a split second after the message to move has already gone to the muscles in question. My decision to get up from my chair is made by some part of me deeper than my conscious awareness. My decision to move comes after the decision itself is already set in motion.

Jonathan Haidt, in his illuminating book, The Righteous Mind, uses the metaphor of an elephant and its rider to describe the mind. The elephant is all the parts (most of them) of our thinking that we are not aware of. The rider, who is ostensibly in charge of the elephant, is our conscious thinking. The rider appears to have some limited power to make small choices about the direction of the elephant, but spends most of his time making up reasons that justify the decisions the elephant has already made. We do not live rational lives. Our lives are shaped and mostly run by our unconscious selective perceptions and unconscious biases. Yikes!

Haidt goes on to say that if you want to convince someone who disagrees with you on an important matter (like who should be our next President), talking to them about reasons and analysis will not be effective. He memorably says: If you want to change someone’s mind, you need to talk to their elephant. You need to speak at the visceral level to the emotions and assumptions that are often below the level of our awareness.

This brings me to considering the decisions that are hardest to make. These are forks in the road that are both important and, in some way, balanced. Not only are we conscious of having to make a decision, but after weighing the options, both possibilities seem to be equally valid. The potential choices all have their pluses and minuses.

Now, sometimes the best solution in this sticky place is neither A nor B, but rather J or K. We often reduce problems to binary choices when, usually there is a whole range of things we have not even considered. Reducing reality to A or B is one way we manage the infinite universe of possibility, but it is also a way we needlessly disturb ourselves and limit our thinking.

But sometimes, either you go or you don’t go. A yes or a no is required. Sometimes there are two choices and both of them feel bad. This is the classic lose/lose situation. Or this is how it appears to the little thinking self.

Adding to the emotional weight of these difficult choices is the perspective we were taught in school that there is one right choice. Most of us have the sense that we need to make the right decision—that there is a right decision. When it is a matter of some importance, a decision that will have repercussions going forward, we want to make sure we get it right.

In the face of all this pressure and the impossibility of making a truly reasonable decision, one wise teacher (Yogi Berra) gave this advice: When you come to a fork in the road, take it. And of course, this is what we all eventually do. After soul searching and considering (which is often important), we simply do something. and the wonderful thing is that whatever we do leads us into our life.

It turns out that there are many answers to the same question, many choices and options that keep appearing and disappearing. We take one step, either skillfully or not skillfully, then we take the next step. Ultimately, life is not simply a moral quandary. Our lives are a woven fabric of small and large choices that offer constant possibility and challenge. We do the best we can and learn as we go.

In the midst of it all, perhaps we can enjoy the view from the top of our elephants and learn a thing or two about working together with them and our own mysterious elephant hearts.

Cycles Within Cycles

The dark is firmly established here in the Temple garden just a month before the autumnal equinox. Nights are cool and lengthening. I wake in full darkness and am re-learning to reach for the light. This is the new normal and will be for the next six months—a lifetime. Each season playing its role in the cycles of the year. And through these cycles, life and death play out in multiple wave lengths.

Dogen said that life itself is flashing on and off 27,000 times a second. He anticipated, through his own careful observation, the theories of some modern physicists who speak of a vibratory universe created of strings of possibility. Substance and continuity are an illusion of consciousness superimposed on the dynamic soup of stuff. Real life cycles itself into existence and then tracelessly disappears at unknown speed.

Slowing down slightly, we can notice is moment after moment. Though we string moments of experience into compelling narratives of who we were, who we are and who we will be, each present moment is its own complete universe. I can’t vouch for Dogen’s 27,000 times per second, but I can vouch for some wholeness that appears in the moment of our conscious awareness. This wholeness includes, but is not limited by, the infinite stories we are telling ourselves and others. In each moment, the fullness of each life is the fullness of all life. Past and future are merely stories that we tell and are both fully included in the infinite time of here.

Then there is the story of the cycle of day after day. The darkness of night giving way to the full light of daily activity. We rouse ourselves early or late, move into our day reluctantly or excitedly, then fall back when the darkness comes again—lying ourselves down restfully or fitfully into the obscurity of night. Again and again we travel through these diurnal cycles of light and dark. The imprint of this earthly revolving rhythm is imprinted in every cell of our body. (Though sometimes needing to be assisted by our morning alarm.)

The daily cycle then appears in abstract circles of weeks and months—a purely human invention that appears to have no connection to the natural world. Why seven days? Why twelve months and not nine? Does February have to be shorter than July? Social custom and convention rule our experience till Friday really feels different from Sunday—just because we’ve decided to divide our lives for the convenience of commerce.

But the seasons—different in every part of the world—come to us viscerally in the varying length of light and dark, the temperature and weather patterns. And all the flora and fauna of each particular place live in and through these subtle patterns. The trees in the Temple garden express and embody the seasons of New England. Hot in the summer with sometimes drought but often rain. Cool in the fall and spring. Then the cold and dark of winter. The coming and going of sap up and down the trunk and the emergence of leaves and the falling of leaves. Continual motion. Continual expression of the annual cycles of season. Look closely at a tree and you’ll know the season.

Then the cycles of the lives of all the beings themselves. The mayflies that live for a day, the wine red hibiscus flowers that open for a few days, the zinnia plants for a season. Then us humans that live for some unspecified length of days, months, years and decades. All our lives with a beginning, middle, then some unspecified but definite end date. We can’t know exactly which part of the cycle we’re in, but those of us of a certain age do certainly know we’re not at the beginning or even the middle anymore.

No time this morning for the centennial oak trees or the forests that live and change for centuries. Then the ponds and streams and mountains and valleys, even planets and stars and galaxies – all appearing and disappearing in their own time.

Morning twilight has come in the time it took to write all this. The nasturtium flowers that last for three or four days and are delicious and lovely to eat in salads are doing their early morning wiggle dance in the soft breezes that float by. The mug that holds my now cold tea was made from mud and water but will be around, broken or whole, for centuries—available to archeologists long after all I see vanishes.

Cycles within cycles. Stories within stories. All resting easily in this moment as the day begins.