Summer First Harvest Moon
Last time the Woollies gathered at Woodfire Grill we got on the topic of Alzheimers. Warren said many people, around two years in, gain a sense of peace about it. “I don’t want to gain peace.” one of us said. That interchange stayed with me, bouncing around, providing background when I read these two quotes recently.
The first one is from a blog I’ve referenced. A link to it is on the right and in the quote. The second is from an NYT’s book review.
“In the last month or two, some of that special feeling—my ability to live in the present, my sense that my life is worthwhile even if I can’t accomplish that much, my sense of joy in living—has been diluted, and I’ve wondered why. Had I slipped back into old patterns, lost the new sense of emotional richness?” Watching the Lights Go Out July 6, 2013
“Like Freud, Mr. Grosz is fond of literary allusions, and he’s nimble at excavating the psychological subtext of literary classics. He reads Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” as “a story about an extraordinary psychological transformation.” One of the lessons it teaches, he argues, is that “Scrooge can’t redo his past, nor can he be certain of the future. Waking on Christmas morning, thinking in a new way, he can change his present — change can only take place in the here and now.” NYT book review of the Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
No, I’m not going to be here now. Not that. I’m sensing in these two quotes and in the conversation at the Woollies a profound realization, the one behind the Zen insistence on the now and, I think, these two observations as well. It’s remarked on most clearly in the first quote. “my sense…my life is worthwhile even if I can’t accomplish that much…” There it is. Right under our nose.
The key to inner peace is not so much living in the present, although that has obvious psychodynamic benefits, but in grasping our true place in the cosmos. Our achievements do not define us. Our capacity to do and act does not define us. Our existence, our very ordinary existence, is sufficient. Enough. Adequate. Good enough. That’s what the author of the Watching the Lights Go Out discovers, that’s what Grosz suggests when in his reading of the Christmas Carol. It was not Scrooge’s skills as a money lender and miser that he needed, but the simple acts of human kindness that he could engage in Christmas morning. He only had to be Scrooge, not a role, bad or good.
And, in the end, if we get to this realization through Zen, knowing ourselves, psychoanalysis or Alzheimer’s, is the quality any different?
