On Your Ideal Age

 

When will you feel valued? Would you be a child again, happy and cared for? (Or weak and controlled?) In your teens, with adventures and potential? (Or pressured and confused?) The twenties, newly adult, beautiful and powerful? (Or unstable, insecure, just getting there?) Surely the thirties are a worldly ideal: organised, healthy, forging ahead? (Or overwhelmed with family, work, finances?) You may never feel worse about your age than turning forty, though you might have half your life before you. Then aging: you’ve collected a wardrobe of sins, errors and things you could have handled better, but you now know a trap when you see one. You might have stellar grandchildren. You might begin to understand your art. The culture of commerce specifies each age, but you don’t lose value as you grow closer to death. I knew a girl who would unexpectedly die at fifteen: every moment she shared beauty and treasure. I met a priest who, in his nineties, heard confession and gave absolution with grace and kindness. Absolute value. You are a soul for whom Christ died. Beautiful and powerful. Beauty is given by the light in which you stand.

On Kindness

 

What do you want to see when you look at your life? If handed a difficult assignment, how did you acquit it? Victories, losses, festivals and tragedies engage you personally. But the colour of events comes from the presence or absence of kindness. Not only benevolence, and the willingness to answer need, kindness can be synonymous with humanity. ‘A real human being’ is distinguished by kindness.

Kindness wishes good for others, but we need to be careful. The doing of good must be good on their terms. Saving souls, for example, can be cruel, with a long history. You can’t use assumptions, nor expectations. Less can be controlled than we would prefer to see.

How can we grow in kindness? Like any other practice it must become a priority. Other things come second. Growth in any useful part of character is only step by step: seeking kindly moments. Slowing down. Doing no harm. Being prepared for teaching when finally understanding you know nothing at all. Putting it all in the frame, from beginning to end.

 Kindness is related to justice; it gives a place or chance to belong. In all humanity, all nature, all salvation.

On the Active and the Contemplative Life

 

You might spend time reading, thinking and feeling. Others are more active: walking, running, talking and sharing. You could be thinking about your feelings or feeling about your thinkings. This takes up a lot of space. (You could be listening to music). You might be solving it by walking, running into nature, speaking into others. (You could be making music). You should be making mistakes, or differences.

Activity most likely intends accomplishment. Do things have to be finished to be worthwhile? Or are many actions as cousins to the arts, which revise, extend and refine continually?  Passivity perhaps absorbs. An intellectual understanding is not understanding; you can talk yourself into anything. Or is what is passively absorbed transformed: by alchemy, philosophy, chemistry, into knowingness or wisdom?

On being asked “How did you feel about this?” one who replies “I felt I had to do something about it” is living the active life. The test then is what you do. One who answers, “I felt I should study it” is contemplating. The test then is what you inspire in others.

Act contemplatively; contemplate actively. What matters is the end you have in mind. This will situate your direction, and your meditation.

On Humility

You can only do what you can do, at any given time. To take the blame is actually a form of spiritual pride. What you can do will often lead to trouble: to suffering, as Buddhists say. All actions have causes and conditions attending them. But the past is becoming more populated, taking energy from the future, apparent only in silhouette.

Politics, which is the matter of the city —more lately the nation, or latterly the world — is crossed by ancient hierarchies curated by modern fears. Is innocence the same as ignorance? Is ignorance the same as guilt? When you’re innocent you’re harmless, but ignorance is typically harmful. And the foolish are lost with the wise. When the matter of the world is harmful, is anyone innocent? Lack of knowledge isn’t lack of harm: quite the contrary. The Biblical nations were empires and cultures of dominance led by Victory, goddess of triumph and glory. She is, however, accompanied by slavery and desolation; it all depends on who you’re talking to. You can only do what you can do, and do it without motivation. Justice is the virtue that gives back to everything that which belongs to it. 

On Looking Again

 

What are you doing, and why are you doing it? Where have you been, and where are you going? You sure you want to go there? Who were you with, and what were they after? Look again.

Looking at this dinner, which seems so small: if you had anorexia, it would look huge. Could you see differently? It might be just the right size. You could apply this to other sizes, too. Too is in fact the problem. Too short, too tall, too round or straight. Too old, or too little. For what cause? I was asked by a poll what kind of life I’d want. Their choice. Adventurous, exciting; secure, taken care of; well-rewarded, important; family first; prosperous, having everything. I said I want an interesting life, but that wasn’t on their list. You couldn’t choose compassion, art, friendship, or contemplation. Look again.

It’s a mystical work to look from differing perspectives. Turn a person or event around like a sculpture in your mind. Turn whole years around. Turn around what you’re doing, how and why. Look at back and front, left and right, above, below. Find a strange point of view. Then do something new.

On Sweeping Away

 

Walking my dog on a street I see once a month I find demolition. Here was a fairy dell, a green deeply shaded path now levelled to a house-block. Machines at work scissoring the ground, where the hard-hats scurry to make a living. Something sold to destruction. Coasting through the city, towering walls of offices, cranes atop, whole streets grind out continuous transformation. Ghosts of sites removed with hardly power to haunt.

Are we the same? How vintage will we become? We might be classic cars, taken for a spin on Sundays. A little shredded, sleeves unthreaded, lacking gloss and shine and shiver. The ghost of past life acts powerfully from its resting-place.

 Can we forgive our gods their weaknesses? Cycling and recycling station and vocation, we scarce catch up with our coattails, sweeping away with leaves on the porch, revolving through sects and checks and balances, of histories as well as books. Vanity is all, saith the preacher.

Yet vintages grow in the vineyards, daily bread is broken, birds nest in the mustard tree. The man who’s painting my house waits for his wife to give birth. I’m serious: the house needs a coat of paint.

On Decisiveness

 

The great choreographer George Balanchine, teaching his company class, would often say, “Do it NOW.” Execute the step now, improve now, don’t stand around waiting to get better: do it now. This method produced dancers reflexively fast, responding in decisive movement. The kiss of the moment is embodied in the words “do it now”.

Decisiveness implies frugality of action. How many things that are mutually exclusive do you try to do at one time? Decide on only one. Reduce choice, until you arrive at the truly necessary. Then abandon regret. Martha had decided feeding her honoured guests was most important; for Mary it was listening to Christ, who commended her. Was Martha’s choice wrong? No, but she cannot then complain about it. Christ was also her guest. She puts the dinner on the table: do it now.

We regret many things that however are passed. You’re not going to get over it. You won’t move on. You can’t leave it behind you. Mistakes are a companion of every life. Go to the cemetery; bring an armload of silk flowers to the dead. See how the choices you make today will mark your memory. Decide. Do it now.