Rearrangements

Yesterday morning I sat for a while under the maple trees in the Temple garden. It was a warm day and I had taken an early cup of coffee out for a stroll before meditation. I was in no hurry. Being in the middle of inner rearrangements, I was strangely free from the plot of my usual timing.

There is a lovely release that sometimes comes from being deeply disturbed. I usually live within an unconscious sense of time and obligation—a day is a certain length and I’ve got so many things to do—but when I come up against something that threatens my inner psychic arrangements, I can find myself momentarily liberated from the certainty of time. The linear connection between the things of my life loosens and I am free to wander in the garden or down the street with no purpose. In the painful breaking down the world as I know it, comes the possibility of being in some new world without compulsion.

A friend who is a writer says that a good story puts characters in situations that challenge their view of the world and force them to come to a deeper understanding of life. Isn’t this what ordinary life does for us all? We’re all participating, willing or not, in the creation and destruction of serial stories about how the world is and how we are. My story may be a self-appreciative (I’m a clever fellow and things are going pretty well) or it may be a self-sabotaging (I’m an idiot who never does anything right). Any story we repeat long enough to ourselves will do to create a provisional sense of self—the necessary ground of daily life.

While we call this mental health, our current President is an example of someone who has taken this all to its logical and pathological extreme. He seems to think if he repeats something often enough and loud enough and refuses to entertain questions about the matter, it will then become the truth. (‘My inauguration was the biggest in the history of the country.’ ‘The only reason Biden appears to have won the election is because of massive voter fraud.’) The problem with Trump is that he has convinced others to enter his reality bubble and it has turned out to be a winning (hopefully just for a short time) political strategy.

Woody Allen tells a wonderful joke in Annie Hall about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist as says, ‘I’ve got a problem. My brother thinks he’s a chicken.’ The psychiatrist says, ‘Why don’t you just tell him he’s not a chicken?’ Allen replies, ‘We need the eggs.’ — Reality is more complex and inter-twingled than we could ever imagine.

We all live in a self-created bubble of understanding of the world that intersect with an uncountable number of other bubbles. A thousand thousand different causes lead us to the views we take of the world as a safe place or a dangerous place—as a place of connection or a place of abandonment. We need these stories as roadmaps to navigate our way through the things of this world. Our stories are necessary and never completely true. I suppose real mental health is have a reasonably workable story and to being willing to continually adjust as we get more information about the world.

The adjustments are inevitably painful. What we thought was true turns out to be only partial. What we were counting on reveals itself to be more provisional than we had hoped. The certainty and solidity that we crave is always crumbling around us. Holding on tighter and trying to keep the reality of change at bay is a recipe for great suffering. But if we choose, we can begin to learn to work with these cycles of understanding and disillusionment. We can even begin to appreciate the times of transition between old certainties and new possibilities.

But back to the garden, because I wanted to write about the falling leaves. It was, as I said, a warm and pleasant morning. The leaves were already covering the ground like a layer of large yellow snowflakes – light and fluffy. As I slowly walked down the hidden brick pathway, I carefully lifted my feet to preserve their lovely obscuring of the walkways and garden landmarks.

I sat down on a chair under the maple trees and sipped my coffee while leaves fell and fell. Sometimes just one or two lazily drifted to the ground. Other times a breeze would come and scores would make their short and final trip together. Each leaf fell with its own urgency and ease. No two paths downward had the same rhythm or trajectory. Each softly fell and softly landed. I watched and listened intently from the heart of my momentary freedom.

Eventually the whisperings of duty called and I reported in for morning meditation—a little late and little rearranged by the time away and by the teachings of the falling leaves.