I was born May 23, 1946. That means the day before Thanksgiving was my half birthday, the midpoint of the year between my 70th and 71st birthdays.
I am still fairly much housebound since the surgery to put my aortic stent in, although I do drive for short distances, do some shopping (always keeping the bags at 5 pounds or less each), spend some time in my local Starbucks just to be out.
With the time on my hands I read, I listen to music, I cuddle the cats.
Most of all I think, I reflect.
What I have not been doing much of is writing, either in the small spiral notebooks I have had as companions since my adolescence, or online, here or elsewhere.
That has not been a restriction due to my health — after all, in the lead-up to the election, I was often posting 4 or more times a day, including during the week between my surgery on November 1 and the election itself.
Rather, it has been because I decided I needed to reflect upon where I find myself, both my place in our political culture going forward, in possible situations of employment, for which I am now again involved in attempting to secure, and on a personal level.
The first such example of the results of such reflection were posted late on Monday, in a piece I wrote in response to seeing the overt anti-Semitism and neo-Naziism that was occurring and was finally directed at me. I titled that piece Religiously I am a Quaker. If you have not yet read it, and want some sense of where I am headed that might be a good starting place.
Today I offer an additional fruits of meditation and reflection, one not as narrowly focused as that was.
That is what will appear below.
One feature I like in Facebook is the Memories — where it reminds me of things I have posted on that date in previous years. Sometimes that will lead me to reread Daily Kos posts from years past. In the process I am sometimes surprised as things — on the one hand, how relevant things I may have written some years back still are, even after the 8 years of the Obama administration. I am also surprised by the depth of insight I am able to demonstrate, and even more by the quality of some of what I have written.
Those things from the past serve a purpose beyond what I have described. They also challenge me to demonstrate that insight and quality of thinking and communication in what I do now, whether in writing here or in the notebooks I have always kept, in my interactions with others, even in my reaction to things I observe or encounter even when I do not then immediately share my reactions in words available to others, spoken or written.
As I now rethink how I address this part of myself as I go forward, I think of when I have been best as a teacher and as a writer. One thing essential to both is to stretch others — to challenge them, to be sure, but also to provide what in education we call scaffolding, the necessary structures and support to enable them to go forward in areas of thought or action that might seem intimidating, for which they may not even believe they have the requisite skills (which of course can be developed) or aptitude (which in fact until they can try in a safe way to fail they cannot fully know).
One of my functions here over the now 13 years since I first encountered this site has been to share with others things I had encountered they might not otherwise notice or experience. Thus well before the Abbreviated Pundit Roundups began I used to use my daily quota of “diaries” to introduce people to the work of other writers — op ed columnists, authors of magazine articles and books. Even with the advent of APR I still find occasion to want to focus attention on the work of a writer others might not experience, or where I think I might be able to offer an insight or reaction that perhaps can be useful to others.
useful to others — that is very much a key for my relationship to the world in which I find myself. Does what I do or communicate offer value to others? I cannot always be sure. Certainly one might question that with respect to those things I post about myself or my wife, particularly the now almost four year journey we have taken together since she was diagnosed with her cancer. And yet, those posts have often become the occasion for others to open up about their own experiences. It empowers them to speak and write. In that sense even a post that is personal in nature serves as means of connecting with others.
This idea of being useful to others does not necessarily mean that I will see for whom or how what I share is useful in the short term, or at all. As I discovered over my two decades as a classroom teacher sometimes the impact of what I invoked in a student did not become clear to that student until years later. In a sense, even as a classroom teacher with experience that may seem similar, I cannot be certain that what I offer is necessarily going to be of value to others. It is a risk. I have described it as somewhat like the experience of rising to offer a “message” in Quaker Meeting for Worship — I am often not quite sure of for whom the message is intended, only that I feel moved enough to know that I am supposed to share it.
For me on a personal level there is another aspect. As I have noted in the past, that while I have lived most of my life as an extravert, I am also fairly shy. I have learned social interactions by first watching others and then by trying out as I simultaneously observe myself. I am not necessarily all that good at it, but I know it is necessary that I not be isolated within myself.
What some don’t know is that I have what my wife calls my monastic streak. That is something that is literally true of me. When I was about 11 I wanted to be a Benedictine Monk, I just didn’t want to be Catholic. Heck, I didn’t even want to be Christian!
In my personal religious peregrinations over the years I have explored becoming a monk more than once, first spending a summer living with Episcopalian Benedictines in Michigan, later having a more than a decade relationship with a monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, whose Abbot agreed to serve as my spiritual father during that time, which included multiple visits, and again a serious exploration of possibly staying there for good.
There have been times in the past where I had a regular practice of prayer. That is, I would recite offices on my own, at regular times. I would also regularly clear parts of the day to focus on meditation or contemplation, not necessarily the same thing.
And yet, it was not those times in which I experienced my deepest meaning, although they served as the scales and arpeggios of the music of my soul when I did experience deeper meaning and insight. They were the drills that prepared me to react without judgment to the opportunities to be totally in a moment, whether playing music, or suddenly having my understanding opened by an encounter with the words of others, or in flash suddenly being totally engulfed by and also at one with something in the natural world, or absorbed in watching a child of any age become totally engrossed and passionate about some aspect of the world in which s/he was then totally present.
Imagine a piece of music you have played or listened to many times. All of sudden, at one moment, there are no barriers to understanding it, or experiencing it. You are totally open to it, there are no boundaries keeping you and that music separate. You become the music, even if only listening to someone else’s performance.
I will not cease to be a person concerned with politics and governance, because I am a citizen. Perhaps I will again teach others about what these mean and what they can do, as I did for so many years. What I realize is that however good my analytical skills might be, they are useful only insofar as they empower others. Analysis is a tool, but tools can be misused. In our analyses we can become too narrowly focused, and in excluding that which we do not include in our analyses we become oblivious to the damage that can be done by the limitations of those analyses.
Can we take our analytical abilities and place them in a larger context? How do they help us understand the wider world, the concerns and needs of the persons in that world? What of the dimensions of that world which the actions of those persons will affect, and thereby possibly harm others not known or even not yet born?
If in reading what I have written you begin to get a sense that I am exploring the dimensions of morality, you are correct. I do not claim special knowledge, understanding, or skill. My recognition of the confluence of morality, spirituality, thought, word, and action is certainly not original.
useful to others — that is of course one quick measure. But the spiritual wisdom of others has informed us that also applies to being truly useful to ourselves: the idea of loving one’s neighbor as oneself is also a warning that if we do not truly know how to love ourselves we will also be incapable of loving others. There are certainly terms we use derived from psychology to describe those who seem incapable of such love. This is not the place for me to repeat them, or to apply them to any person however prominent in our current political discourse, although I have in the past and may well continue to do so in the future, in a different context than in which I write at this moment.
In some spiritual traditions elders may argue that the very idea of self can be destructive, because it separates one in an artificial way from the rest of creation. Or as the Buddhist sage is reported to have said to the hot dog vendor, “make me one with everything.” The notion of “self” is a tool that can help to understand, but should not be limited to self against others or everything not-self.
So what am I saying in this rambling and perhaps intellectually at best semi-coherent set of words?
I have always known that in some ways I was an oddity and did not really belong anyplace particular. That is one part of the “self” I am. At the same time what was harder for me to realize is being that oddity meant that I was not bound by a “self” that was defined in part by where I belonged, but rather empowered to see the freedom inherent in not being necessarily “American” or “white” or “male” or “of Jewish background” or “formally educated” or “Democrat” or “liberal” or any other label of identification/ belonging. That gave me a fluidity of action and of understanding beyond my own experience, if only I allowed for it. That is, it expanded the possibilities of who I actually am, because I exist not just as “self” apart from non-self, but as “self” that shares common elements with those identifications I might not otherwise apply to my own person.
For the years I have been here I have been a teacher. Recently several possibilities of again being in a classroom have come up. I will find out in the next few weeks if these are “real” or merely reflections of what I have done in the past, and thus challenges for me to move beyond the notion of the self as teacher, as belonging in that definition.
I have passed another half-birthday. I have another half-developed understanding as a result.
As a teacher, I have always known that I must first be a student, that the roles are simultaneous and fluid. As I have discovered, so is the notion of self, even though I come to realize as I pass through the latter stages of my life that there are aspects that are essential, at least for me. Without them I could not function at all, and thus could not truly be useful to others.
And thus a conundrum. To see myself as separate from others almost seems a prerequisite to being useful to them, except that it can also serve as a barrier, insofar as I see myself as apart.
So I wrestle with real meaning, not just in how I can express what ultimately I intuit beyond the limits of my cogitation or any skills of verbal expression I may have.
I come to a partial realization — that how I express matters less than how I live, starting in the smallest actions I do. Insofar as I justify selfishness I am seeing self as opposed to non-self, and as such am neither useful to others nor true to what my “self” really is.
If that makes any sense.
If I see wrong, how do I address it?
If I perceive wrong in others, what does that mean for the wrong in me, what others can perhaps offer me to overcome whatever self-blindness I may be exhibiting?
How can I/we use this ability to recognize wrong — and good — serve not to separate us but to bind us to a common purpose?
I claim no answers.
I am only after more than 7 decades just beginning to formulate the queries.
What is the music that then flows from the scales and arpeggios of those queries?
Peace?