Samain Moving Moon
A continuing conversation. Purity of heart. Scott asked Sunday if he could not will one thing was his heart impure? Took me some thought but I realized the answer. No, not impure, divided.
A divided heart is the normal human condition, a heart pulled among family, self, ambition, beauty, money, any of the sundry things which can seem urgent, central to us. Kierkegaard is, of course, holding out an ideal, an instance in which we can bring all of who we are into one focus, on one central value. Kierkegaard saw that one thing as love of God, all else falling short.
Back to the U curve graph I talked about a while back, the one where life satisfaction goes down as we reach mid-career then heads up as we age. I proposed that we get happier because aging imposes limits on us: financial, physical and temporal. Another way to think about it might involve the divided heart. Perhaps as we age, we become (or can become) less divided in our will.
This could relate to my desire to do only those things that only I can do. Once we get clearer on who we are, what our Self is, we become (or, again, can become) more focused. This may be the process of our heart becoming less and less divided.
It may be that the third phase is a whittling down of the divided loyalties at our center, a purging of the now understood to be less critical, less urgent, less central. As that U nears the top of the right hand, it may reflect the heart yearning toward, perhaps achieving unity. It is a consoling idea to me to think that we might be able, near the close of our life, to will one thing, even if for only a short period. We might call it at-one-ment.