Unbidden

It’s Christmas morning. I am alone. Well not exactly, the three wise men are here. The Magi are my only decorations. With them, I see the sunlight, and am embraced by the silence. The morning casts a spell, and I fall into a reverie. I find myself thinking about the many gifts I have received over the course of this lifetime. Gifts, I didn’t even know were coming, and sometimes, didn’t even recognize until much later. They all came unbidden.

I could easily say the best gifts are unexpected ones. Life is full of them. This morning I’m noticing.  Gratitude is toothless, until it recognizes the great flow that keeps coming towards us. It is amazing! A friend was describing watching the growth of his infant grandson, he observed this child learning to reach for something. Each movement revealed possibilities, which eventually led the child to be able to touch what it desired. The Life coursing through that child organized itself into action and eventual mastery.

Fulfillment, like desire, is a gift that comes naturally. Life is like that, it keeps delivering.

Strangely, while sitting here, all alone, I am able to grasp perhaps the greatest gifts of all — the things, sometimes they are only feelings, that alter the course of my life. All of them have been unexpected miracles. Some have been wrapped in grief and pain. I didn’t want those gifts. They came all the same. Twisting me all around, giving me a perspective I wouldn’t have sought out. I’ve seen some light, and it isn’t always fun. But, it is always educative. I’m better able to reach now.

The unbidden has been my benefactor and my bane. Life wouldn’t be life without the surprises, that show me how off balance I am. What flows toward me is always more than I can handle, and it introduces me to myself. Talk about a gift! I am not just what I imagine.

Neither are you. If I’m willing to know it, like I am today, then I am confronted by another surprising gift. Loneliness has its benefits. The view can be breathtaking. Unbidden, a vision can come. All of a sudden, a lonely reverie can turn into an important moment, a surprise recognition. Life, we know, works in strange ways. Unbidden, Mystery walks in the door, invisible but palpable — light afoot, with heavy consequence.

Everything changes, and nothing changes. I am alone as ever, and I am full of an emptiness I can’t understand, or command. And, its spilling everywhere. Unbidden, my life is being swept into the unimaginable. 

The gifts I have received have altered me, they have overwhelmed me, short circuiting some of my dreams, and made me recall others. Unbidden, comes the recognition that I am being cared for, that the Universe is doing a job on me, and that something greater than the Christmas Spirit is goosing me on. I sit and marvel, and wonder, how could I do anything else, and then I do. Unbidden.

Like Music and Dance

I’ve been engaged in the effort to overcome a pattern of arrogance that has haunted me, and undermined most of what I have valued throughout my life. The learning process, has been hard, humiliating, discouraging, and extremely educative. In some strange way, the darkness has shined a light on a surprising awareness. The obvious is not always so obvious. At least not to the arrogant.

I was able to make sense of a family pattern of protective inflation that I’d inherited. I thought I was better than everyone, because that had been the traditional way of dealing with the threat of inferior feelings in my family for centuries. I was a good son of the Goff family. I was arrogant, proud, and subtle with my dishonesty. In other words, I hid well. That is good, in public, external ways — but not so good in personal intimate terms. Arrogance is a bad seedbed for loving.

As you can imagine, it has been very deflating to see this. Grief and regret accompany me, like the angels that haunted Scrooge. They accompany me, and remind me of the graveyard.

All of this sadness has had a purpose. It is sensitizing me. The water of culture, that I have been swimming in, is becoming more visible and nuanced. For instance, I can now see how my tendency toward arrogance (which first grew out of my family’s sense of inferiority) lent itself well to a cultural reliance on authority. I went from secretly feeling inferior, like I didn’t belong, to being trained as a professional helper. I became a valued commodity, a knowledge pro, someone who could be looked to for guidance. This is a great place for an arrogant one to hide. There is nothing so disguising as being socially sanctioned.

The training even convinced me, that if I knew something, I must be valuable. I went from a wrong sense of inferiority to an equally wrong sense of inflated rightness. I was a valued cultural caricature of expertise — the embodiment of the reliance on knowing that infects our times. I was so well hidden that I hardly knew myself. I came to believe that by being transplanted into a valued member of society. I had overcome the family uncertainty.

Learning how untrue that is  —  has been one of the greatest and most humiliating boons of this re-orienting process. To some extent, some of the cultural trance has worn off. I can see that the metaphor of the journey, the endless pursuit of some sense of something to come, has prevented me from enjoying the moment. I have been so goal-oriented, that I’ve been missing out on what is going on around me. Instead of playing, I’ve been trying to prove myself in societal terms.

I have been brought by a deeply chagrining self-revelation, to an awareness, that my arrogance is part of a larger arrogance, a cultural assumption that life is really about achievement. It is the goal-less — the momentary dance —  that really carries the energy of delight, and alignment with the larger processes of life. In my family pattern of arrogance, and then later in the cultural pattern of arrogance (the reliance on knowing), I missed the boat.

Joy is in the music of the moment, the expanded now, that some elders are capable of experiencing. Joy isn’t in becoming, there isn’t any salvation project that can deliver it, it’s in being, taking the moment more fully in. In my arrogance, in my family’s misdirected attempts, in our culture’s glorification of knowledge to be gained, is an abiding failure. Life is playing through us — dancing to a music that has no goal but delightful beauty. 

Differing

“Every aspect of tragedy must be the bones 

supporting the rest of life, 

What I cling to… is the belief that difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.”

                                                                                  Florida Scott-Maxwell (84)

                                                                                       FromThe Measure Of My Days (published in1968)

Differing can be so problematic that it holds a lot of evolutionary potential. 

I’ve experienced, and promoted, a lot of hurt, because of confused assumptions, misunderstandings, and wrong judgements. The hurting caused by these insensitivities seems to define us as human beings. It seems that we humans don’t respond well to differences. Almost all of our wars, that have ravished us throughout our history, have to do with being different from one another. My own experience of relationship pain has been mostly about how we differ. So, I’ve come to see this as a particularly difficult and high potential phenomena for attention.

I have believed that this was an issue, that with enough attention, one outgrew. Elders seem to be particularly gifted when it comes to differing (see page 93 of The Evolving Elder). Now I see it another way. I think this is an issue that is an evolutionary driver. In other words, I don’t think it has a once and for all solution. It is something that requires one to live with tension. One can go too far, one way, towards intolerance of all differences, and the other way, towards obliviousness, and ignorance of important differences. The goal is to get comfortable enough, to be capable of holding difference long enough, to recognize them, and ferret out their true benefits.

I think about the journey that diversity and difference has set me upon. I am an average white male, born American in 1948. When I think of the distance in tolerance between me and my grandfather, a Klansman, I can’t help thinking about Star Trek. I’ve been beamed into the future. I am more accepting of differences than he could have ever been, and I’m still learning so much about how they manifest. I’m not exactly color-blind, but I’m a whole lot more comfortable with issues of race, religion, or gender. Because of my age and disabilities, the prejudices I’m most familiar with, have to do with disability prejudice, and its other form, ageism. Thanks to my relationships I’m also learning about personal differences, which manifest more as differences in awareness, reality, and beliefs.

Differing now seems to me an important and edgy enterprise. Our uniqueness, and gift to each other, depends upon it, and our sense of belonging and connection, challenges it. And each of us gets to live within the uncertainty that differing generates. Holding on to yourself, and letting go at the appropriate moments, caring for another, it’s all so complicated. There isn’t a final solution, or even a resting awareness, there is only a deep and humblingly educative engagement. Humans fall down, people get hurt, whether you do grapple with differing or not. I certainly have fallen prey to both sides of differing: hurting and hurt.

Our ancestors never got to contend with this issue much. They tended to live in enclaves of alikeness, what I now call communities of affinity. We can’t take them as models. Our well-being, culturally and personally, depends upon us learning how to embrace differences without giving up our own. The Earth, and all of its children, are depending on us to learn how to differ well.

Differing is one of the places where I have most to learn.

I Am Not Who I Imagine

Living and learning can be really painful. Acceptance is so humbling. Everything depends upon a human’s ability to learn from his/ or her mistakes. But when such learning reveals how off one’s self-image is, then another ice shelf breaks off, and the climate grows even more uncertain. Life is full of these kinds of de-stabilizing revelations. There is no movement toward the light, that isn’t presaged by another movement into the dark.

I’ve come to acknowledge the dark. I’m in it now, confronted by my own ignorance and arrogance. I played out a game, a narrative of specialness, that has turned out to be another indication that I don’t know myself. I’m not who I imagine myself to be. 

I once took pride in having learned a lot by surviving an unbelievable ordeal. But, now I see how inflated that is, the truth is that Life spared me, and I don’t know why. But, I didn’t let that bit of ignorance stop me. Instead I assumed I knew something. I separated myself, with that wrong-headed assumption. That is always a mistake. But, it was one I was eager to make, to try to offset the nakedness, the sheer vulnerable exposure of being human. So eager, so blind, so utterly lost. I now know something about how much hurt I inflicted. 

I am so deeply ashamed of myself. I have broken my own heart. I am not who I imagined. And yet, I’m still alive. Life is not done teaching me. Can I open this broken piece of heart tissue, and offer it up again, knowing I am not who I imagine? Can I risk creating so much heartache and pain, in myself and others, to become someone again? I don’t really know. All I know now, is that I am not who I imagined myself to be.

You Are Not Who I Imagine

Old age is full of life-long realizations, by that, I mean discoveries that lead one to a greater truth than one used to believe. One of those has come to me recently. I’m still integrating it. I’m feeling some mixture of shame and delighted satisfaction. You see, realizing my life-long insensitivity reduces me in my own eyes, but having this awareness at all, especially now, grows my sense that I am still learning, still using the tools Mystery granted me. Becoming more through becoming less is a rigorous path, reserved, I believe, for we who are aged. Chagrin is a badge of courage.

It is that way for me, as I begin to come to grips with seeing the extent to which I have made up some of the most important people in my life. I missed their essential uniqueness, in my hurry to know them. Unbeknownst to me, I was busy making them up for my sake. I let my childhood unfinished business, my adulthood power needs, my unconscious striving, my sense of the Mystery, create my perception. I only saw what I wanted to see. 

I don’t know about you, but when I look at my relationship patterns, I see a lot of mistaken identity. I did a weird kind of makeover on those I supposedly loved. I couldn’t help myself. I forgive my immature, desperate self. I just wish I had been a little more developed.

Theoretically, I am now. At least I can see that I loved so poorly, with such good but lame intentions. I have had the tendency to make up the ones I let get close to me. They all held something for me, something I think my well-being depended upon. I imagined them, missed their essential nature, and then got angry with them, when my projections and blind desire ultimately fell apart. Reality prevailed. I learned — and became more — through suffering with my own limitations, and through mistreating those closest to me.

All of that behavior is a source of grief, but it is good grief, because it pushes me towards seeing others, and myself, anew. Lately, I can see a new, I hope better, relationship awareness settling in. I find myself saying things like “You are not mine, and I am not yours,” indicating some awareness that others exist for their own purposes, and not for my sake. This seems like such a basic decency; a form of respect I wish I’d always been capable of. 

It’s too bad I was never had the psychological distance (maturity) to perceive the other as “the other,” as someone having an existence, a fate, of their own. I might actually be capable of a relationship now.

This is all a result of a life-long inability — a stubbornness actually — an unwillingness to perceive, and accept, reality as it is. I had a host of preferences that got in the way. Life isn’t what I have imagined either. 

Thank goodness, I got to this realization. It has been one of the favors of growing old. I’ve gotten to see, what my responsibility has been, for my many deluded failures. I still have a chance of loving better. 

Now I have a hunger for life, and I won’t accept all the pseudo-realities I once did. This is such an improvement. I chuckle wearily at the lifetime of painful mistakes it has taken for me to become wise to my own folly. I’ve come the bitter way to a better life, one I have more reason to believe I’m not just imagining. For all of that I’m thankful.

Where the Light Gets In

“There is a crack in everything.”

                                                                Leonard Cohen

There are some places in life, that are compelling because of their importance and difficulty. 

Some things hurt us so much, at the same time, that they are lifting us beyond ourselves. 

At one moment Life can make me so tender and so hateful. It has been fairly said, “you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.” No matter what your stripe is, or in whose hands you put your heart, the crack that is relationship is going to work one over, break and open the heart, and ultimately let some light in. This bit of reflection honors the frustrating truth that being twisted around by the heart— and where it takes you — is part of Nature’s gift to us.

 Relationship has always been a love/hate part of my life. I haven’t done it well. I have created more hurt than I really care to look at. But, despite the debacles, and now I’m certain because of them, I’ve been grown. Each time I dared to open my heart, for the right or wrong reasons (and there have been plenty of them), I have had delivered to me more insight, pain, wonder and humility than I could handle. The bees made sweet honey (hopefully) out of my many failures.

I could go on in this vein for some time. I am a typical white male, educated by my own insensitivities, socialized by certain assumptions and violence —that made me a bad candidate for the very thing that redeemed me — the love of others. I am amongst the many walking wounded, the lost and lonely refugees of a continuous conflict between differing hearts. I’ve been touched by love too, more now in my later years, and have at last come to see that the miracle has been cracked all along.

I don’t know about you, but I have always assumed that if I could find the right person, or circumstance, I could find relationship contentment. I guess I thought Mystery comes in some preconceived package. It doesn’t. But, I haven’t really given up that notion. I fail, repeatedly, in a gloriously human way. It is one of the things I’m actually quite good at.

Anyway, I’ve come the bitter way to a better understanding. The relationship darkness that haunts me, even to this day, exposes me to more light than I can stand. Good relationships guarantee that I am brought to my kneesand thrust right up against my limitations. I can’t live with them, and can’t live without them. No wonder I’m ambivalent at times.

The light comes in anyway. It doesn’t always feel good.  Sometimes it illuminates a seething mess, but always it brings some tender awareness, a forgiveness that is coated in redeeming humiliation. I’ve done it again –broken something precious. And participated in a birth, of light, of heart, of sweet and terrible illumination.  The light gets in through the cracks in my/our hearts.

Difficulties

“Every aspect of tragedy must be the bones 

supporting the rest of life, 

What I cling to…is the belief that difficulties are what makes it honorable and interesting to be alive.”

                                                                                  Florida Scott-Maxwell (84)

                                                                                       FromThe Measure Of My Days (published in1968)

“Hold to what is difficult”— Rainer Marie Rilke

It was the words of Rilke, “Hold to what is difficult,” that jumped off the page, and started an avalanche in my being. There was some kind of mysterious cascading sensation that made me buy that book, in that unknown bookstore, on that day. I didn’t know it at the time, but that moment presaged my luck.

At the time, I knew I was taken by Rilke’s words, I thought of them primarily as good advice from someone far smarter than I. Little did I know that those words were prophetic, referring to my coming life, and the most incredible form of grace that comes into all of our human lives.

I am rendered almost speechless by the elegant democracy of hardship. It enters even the most successful person’s life, there is no privilege that is capable of forestalling tragedy, suffering and difficulty. All of us are in that particular crucible. It is the difficult degree of challenge that brings out the incredible humanity that is available within us.

I’m not just tooting my own disabled horn here. Life seems to have devised a devilishly effective means for evoking our potential. It starts with what appears tragic, and calls for the response that turns pain and insecurity into Creation. There is a kind of alchemy here that goes way beyond human intention to something mysterious, dark, and grossly compelling. What hurts and overwhelms is what teaches and creates best. My soul didn’t see that coming, or perhaps it did, the avalanche started somewhere.

Now I consider myself “Lucky” not because I no longer am in the hands of difficulty, but because difficulty seems to have a permanent grip on me. Being disabled is horribly edifying. Weirdly, perhaps dementedly (I am 70 after all), I now consider the “good life” to be the one hardship has wrought. Wisdom doesn’t come with long life, I now think, it comes with a blessedly difficult one. 

Nothing seems to sensitize us as well as genuinely difficult initiatory ordeals. These are the painfully dubious experiences no shaman can evoke, and no workshop, or lifelong practice can prepare us for. It is the natural hardship of existence, the difficulty of being truly human, that draws out of each of us our true character. One cannot fake pleasure and equanimity in the face of the natural workings of hardship and difficulty. Grace is wickedly accurate.

You don’t have to go looking for difficulty. There is no practice for becoming. Life handles it. Spiritual aspirations don’t provide immunity. One cannot hope lightening will fall on your head.  Difficulty comes in its own way, uniquely suitable for each of us. 

Then we have only our response.  The world smiles when hardship makes us the strangely receptive beings we can be.

De-patterning

This is a complex topic, because it addresses a fundamental attribute of being human, something we are good at. In short, it is a strength, that when carried too far, is a profound difficulty, which must be overcome. You’ll see what I mean as I proceed. 

Over the years, as I have been doing a variety of things related to aging, I’ve noticed that all old people are not the same. The vast majority of older people are caught up in what I call ruts, that is, routines that have always been successful at bringing them comfort and safety. They are the ones I call ‘merely older.’ They, to my eyes, are rut-bound — captive of patterns of their own making. 

I have also noted, and given special attention too, the minority of old folks who are elders, or on the way toward elderhood. They have ruts too, but are actively trying to identify, and get out of them. For them, the patterns of a lifetime hinder their freedom and creativity. As you might guess, these few, are more in the moment, and more original. It is to them, I look, for examples of what’s uniquely possible in we humans.

Here, I’m not so concerned about the plight of old people, as I am about the human tendency to adopt patterns that become ruts — which trap and diminish us. You see, our very development seems to depend upon our ability to adopt good routines, but our aspiration to be free, depends upon our ability to break out of them. Fail to adopt optimal patterns, and one never becomes coherent and recognizable, but stay too long with any pattern and risk becoming rigid and inflexible. 

This is vexing challenge — one that befits an organism as complex as we humans. But, in my estimation, it accounts for the limited number of true elders in our midst. People don’t realize how dangerous their own capabilities are. The successful routine that guaranteed love, attention, safety, or self-worth, ultimately becomes the habitual and binding rut that enslaves imagination and hardens attitudes into prejudices. Supremacy of all sorts lives in the cherished ruts of yesteryear.

Breaking these old patterns, and climbing out of old ruts, is an essential component of being human. This is an endeavor that is always difficult, and essential. It is comparable to molting. A significant part of the difficulty involved, is that going beyond these old patterns, always includes periods of vulnerability. Exposure to the unknown is part of the deal. Enculturated humans in particular are allergic to this kind of exposure — making the ruts (routines) all that more alluring.

Rutting, of all sorts is very human — as is escaping the ruts. That is why children like to get dizzy, and why many people like altered states. Each provides a way to experience the world anew, from a brief, rut-free zone. None of these avenues, as powerful (like mind-altering substances) as they are, provides the innate confidence that comes with discovery. This is an on-board natural skill. It is part of our human resilience — a part, which needs to be exercised, to be believed.

De-patterning, escaping our self-made ruts, is as natural and essential as all forms of birth. We have no choice but to practice de-patterning, but whether we get good enough at it, depends upon willingness (courage) and insight (understanding the necessity of exposure) to practice it throughout a lifetime. Because this is so, it is easy to see that elders grow, like the rest of us, through the breaking of old, formerly binding patterns. De-patterning is another form of emancipation. De-patterning is wisdom — unleashed.

Opening

Passing from one world into a larger more spacious, complex, and liberating one is a human capacity. It isn’t well-known, but if you think about it, you and everybody you know, has passed from baby to adult. Along the way, there were many stages, many trips beyond oneself to a larger world. All it took was Nature’s pushing, growing us into the occupant of a larger way of being. The capacity to open up, and become something more, is built into our DNA, it is the way of Nature.

Like the crab we learn to abandon our shells to grow, to become, to occupy the world. Unlike the crab our carapace is located more within us, rather than outside, and because humans are a complex organism, molting (becoming larger) is a more complicated maneuver. At certain stages, the shifts that engender awareness, require humans to suffer growth pains, in the form of confusion, anxiety, depression, and vulnerability. These feelings arise around the impending urgency of growth, that wells up from within —no matter what — they occur from growing, or not growing.

It is for this reason — the growth pressure within — that there is a lot of normal suffering. It is also for this reason that we humans need to know about opening. A big part of this knowing is hard to stomach, disillusioning even — although a sure sign of maturation. Growing is painful, and involves periods of vulnerability. Leaning into anxiety and fear, feelings that impending change invariably produce, is counterintuitive, even as it validates what a complex animal we are. Opening is hard, but essential, for any kind of resilient being to stride deeper into the world.

It is easy to get mesmerized, hypnotized by the political and environmental conditions that threaten the worst kind of changes. These kinds of circumstances, charge the experience of change, with all kinds of feelings and ideological baggage. Change appears to be so hopeful to some, and so threatening to others. As a result cultural change has grown constipated. It needs a period of openness.

This is where Nature comes in. It open us. Despite ourselves, we humans give birth— to ourselves, to each other, to greater capacity, even to a world complex enough to include our diverse aspirations. The thing is, for this birth to happen, for the quickening that presages it to stir, a period of openness must occur. This means more vulnerability, uncertainty and unknowing than most of us are used to. Inviting a new sensibility, a world capable of holding so much diversity, means surrendering our knowing, putting aside our best laid plans, and our hoped for visions. Openness is exacting.

Nature has delivered to us the experience of opening. It is more awkward and vulnerable than most of us like. It can be as brutal as birth. It can also be a blessed entryway — a portal — a new way of seeing ourselves, each other, and the world we share. Strangely, Nature has anticipated times this stuck. It has provided us with the capabilities we need. Opening is not as hard as not opening. 

Existential threats are known to create communal opening, as do some forms of hallucinogens, ageing can do it too, but the opening needed now is more pervasive than all of that — it is the opening of the human heart. The moment contains existential threat enough — psychedelic wonder sufficient to the task. What remains is for each of us to open ourselves. I know this is easier said than done, but let me remind us all — this is how Life proceeds.

 Luckily, Life has aged me into paradoxical awareness — so I can sense the opening in what’s closing around us.

Deciding

Are you in a prison 

or

 are you in a playhouse

or

both?

The process of shaping one’s life never seems to stop. Change goes on, with or without us. We get to have some input into this inexorable dance, but it isn’t large and definitive. Mostly, it’s after the fact, lame, and fairly poorly thought out. Still, no factor plays as large a role in how we shape ourselves as the choices we make. Deciding exercises the autonomy that is us — it shapes how we live, and who we are. It is so important, and so rarely examined. I wonder why? Perhaps, this writing meditation will shed some light on this soul-bending phenomenon.

I think my life is mostly a lucky accident. I’ve been given a lot of credit for what I became during an unbelievable ordeal. The truth of it is, not much courage was required. I could read the writing on the wall, dead or alive — I belonged to Life — about that I had no choice. I still don’t. Life chose for me, I survived briefly. I’m in that interlude now. I get to decide how I play this second chance, and that means that I am once again thrust up against my own attitudes about this existence.

I dwell in crazy possibility. I am, afterall, a radical unlikelyhood. So, for me, this phase of this life, is a free pass. Brain damage and luck have forged a strange passport that gives me free reign, a kind of diplomatic immunity, to be weird, eccentric, and slightly off, without the usual consequences. You see, it’s hard to take what’s left very seriously.

But, I remember the time before my stroke of luck. I was such an upright human, so desperate to learn, to live right, to be one of the reliable ones. My decisions, about myself, and my way of being with others, dripped with  eagerness. I was a mensch wannabee. My decisions followed accordingly. I lived well, in my well-appointed jail cell, locked into my desire for other’s to like and approve of me, and what I’d become.

This is a meditation on choice, and I am struck by the paradox, that I call myself “Lucky” because I had no choice. Life took away all my options, and gave me something I could never have cooked-up. The passport Life gave me at the border is something I never deserved, something I never even imagined. Still, it is carrying me through the provinces I thought I knew, and it is introducing me to the possibilities that I couldn’t see. Being human has become a kind of high bafflement, that defies what I was taught, and asks me to go further.

The truth is I can’t decide. Is being here a gift from some source beyond, or a curse? — a lively mystery tour, or an unfolding nightmare designed to unnerve. It seems schizo-enough to be all of the above. So, here I am, unable to decide, and without a choice about having to decide. So, I’m looking for Life to keep carrying me along despite my decisions. And, I’m getting Life carrying me along, in the way it is, because of my decisions. How’s that for justice? I decide despite myself, and I get to live with the consequences.

I know I’m no clearer about deciding, than I was when I began this inquiry. Deciding seems to have some kind of ephemeral veil — what looks easy and necessary, turns out mysterious and undecipherable. Life seems to hang on my attitudes and beliefs, and then some hitchhiking wonder takes over the wheel.

There’s nothing illuminating in what I’ve written, and maybe that is the greatest asset that this treatise holds.

Emancipated Innocence

Take another look at the title for this piece. Emancipated innocence•. Try to remember these words. Why? Because they represent a lighthouse concept, a key that unlocks a portion of the future, and a clarifying breeze that gently blows away the cultural fog that obscures what is good about growing older. Freedom lies ahead for those who remember. So does the re-enchantment of the world. These words represent a powerful aspect of Nature, which is way too undervalued today.

Emancipated innocence. What does that mean? How is it relevant to us? These are good questions, worth exploring. The word ‘emancipated’ means freed from something, in this case, the myopic views owned by the culture, not just on old people, but almost everything. It often takes a life-time to realize how much bad advice and misdirection is provided by cultural convention. 

Part of what makes it so hard to free oneself, is that we each have loved ones, friends and family, that are so afraid of coloring outside the lines. They have carved ruts for themselves, that they want give to us. They are lovingly offering the same kind of protection, which they suffer from. Sometimes, most often, it takes a lifetime to work up the courage to transcend them, go through the anxiety they won’t face, and find freedom for oneself.

There is a big difference between the innocence of childhood, and the innocence that comes to some in later life. I call this rebirth, elder innocence. An infant’s innocence is mesmerizing. It is a fresh encounter with Life that is so engaging, to a child, and to anyone witnessing the awe of discovery. It is a totally fascinating and naïve encounter with the world, that takes place before a child is hobbled by the practices of civilization.

Elder innocence is similar, but something else. For instance it isn’t exactly naïve. It is a re-discovery of the magic and natural beauty of the world, a fresh not-knowing, that is a product of liberation from the gravitational pull of mass knowing, the cultural hubris of the times.

Elder innocence is as compelling as childhood innocence, maybe more so, because it is infused with delight and pleasure. There is nothing so joyful, so happy-making, as emerging from the gauntlet of a life defined by other’s — and/or cultural decrees.

Emancipated innocence is an achievement. Not like the product of trying to recover naiveté, but the outcome of being brave enough to become oneself, despite the straightjacket that is offered to fend off fear and anxiety. It is the hard-won innocence, which reflects the failure to kow-tow to the well-meaning, but bad advice of others. It is life lived to the beat of a different drum. It is ultimately, a bonus for trusting what stirs within.

Emancipated innocence is different than childhood innocence in another important way; it requires something of us. The re-enchantment of the world occurs not solely because of nature, or of human effort, but because the two are combined. Wonder interrupts the planned life. Uncertainty intrudes. And, the future and the past become one extended moment. Life does its mystical thing to us. And, if we have the will — we are freshly humbled by these things — and susceptible.

Innocence is unknowing. It thrives because of uncertainty. It’s not good for business (commercial activity), but it insures a better relationship with the mystery of this existence. Innocence always takes two; the observer and the observed. It is within us, just waiting under the encrustations of expectation, for attention. It is a resonating invitation to look again.

Crumbling

All it takes is a little look around, and I see what I don’t want to see. My world is crumbling. It is going the way of the dinosaur, becoming the scene I once was thrilled being within, the family that once bore me, the life I once lived. It is all moving on, passing so quickly, going into the inscrutable silence. I am overwhelmed, sensitized and dumbfounded. Living now is an affair of loss. Everything is crumbling.

There was a time when I merely complained about this. It seemed some anomaly, a lose edge designed to awaken me, and return me to a former life refreshed by a bigger perspective. But now, I cannot deny the impermanent nature of all things. This, as a friend says, is a bittersweet realization. It frees me as it reduces me. The crumbling is me.

I can rhapsodize about death. The great poets and holy men have made of it a kind of healing justice, but none have taken away the heartache. Hot tears may wash me clean for awhile, but the steady corrosion of loss, eats away all the cleanliness. I am the wicked witch of the west shrinking into nothingnesss. I am the mystery that is here and gone. I am an illusion I had for a while. Crumbling is.

There is relief in knowing nothing is permanent. I relish the demise of what I cannot abide. But then, I don’t let myself know what inevitably follows. Into whatever, the mysterious disappearance, the many after-life assumptions, the mad refrains of freedom and peace, do not appease the uncertain ache of the crumbling. I am amazed, delirious, sobered and incredulous. The crumbling goes on unabated.

Is it delirium; a form of intimacy, a desperate admission, a death bed confession, a wise resignation, an admission of vulnerability, to say that the crumbling is a brilliant and highly anxiety-producing aspect of my experience? Do I love more, or shrink more, because of it? I don’t know. The crumbling goes on anyway.

There isn’t a lot to write about, when everything passes. No words could ever capture the completeness of extinction. Although I’m capable as a human of knowing of this fate, I’m not really capable of fully appreciating it. Stillness does not reverberate with meaning. Silence is not a home. Even if I am better, or worse, because I recognize the crumbling, I cannot hold those ways of being long. It all comes to pass.

Crumbling seems to be my birthright. It is a more faithful companion than any I might have thought I knew. There is only a brief moment of astonishment and grief, then it all crumbles.

I am bereft, feeling the loss, in my friends losing loved ones, in my own losses, in the steady drumbeat of grief around me, in the passing of formative events. Crumbling seems to highlight to me what is briefly important, before it too passes beyond my reach. I don’t know if it is a curse or a blessing, perhaps its both, but I know for sure, it brings my wonder up to a resonating, one could say quivering, uncertainty. Crumbling gets me.

A Perfect Blunder

Every once in a while, I have a discussion with someone, which veers off into territory, which surprises and delights me. This one, contained a story. I’ll repeat that story here, as best I can, because it illustrates to me, the actions of an ineffable and largely unknown power, that works to use each of us, in ways we seldom recognize and enjoy. 

It all revolved around blundering, or as my friend said early on in our interaction, “making terrible mistakes.” We had a little laugh when I suggested that she should be congratulated for failing so well. To illustrate her bad feelings, and to perhaps offset my irreverent attitude, she told me what had happened. I’m glad she did. Now, I’ll tell it to you.

She is about to be 80. Like many of us old people, some of her long-time friends are dying. In this case, it is a man she has known for 50 years or more. His wife — also a friend — wanted to keep his illness a secret. She, the wife, wasn’t yet ready to face the end of his life. Mistakenly, or so she thought at the time, my friend let the cat out of the bag, by revealing to another acquaintance, that it looked like this man was dying. 

This acquaintance, just happened to be part of the tight-knit community of artists that this man was an esteemed member of. It wasn’t long before the word of his impending death got around in his community. About that time, while visiting, my friend heard the wife get a call, that revealed to this  overwhelmed spouse, that everyone in the community knew her husband was dying. The wife didn’t appreciate the community’s awareness.  She flew into a hateful rage. At the woman she thought had disclosed the precious truth of her husband’s impending demise.

The irony for my friend was that she knew that, she herself, had been the one who had inadvertently disclosed the truth. She reported to me the shame she felt as she listened to her friend — the bereaved spouse’s tirade of hate and anger, directed at an innocent acquaintance. My friend couldn’t reveal this new truth, and had to sit and hear all the vituperative language aimed at her innocent acquaintance. This was a moment of deep chagrin for my friend — and the irony of it, required her to look at herself.

This turned out to be part of the perfection of this particular blunder. She realized that this was a moment when she had to befriend and forgive herself. It was only during recounting the story to me, that she realized, that she had managed to hold herself with compassion.

Even more perfectly, I realized later, she had assisted in informing the man’s community of their impending loss, so that they could honor him, and take care of their hearts. The wife, I’m sure well intended, couldn’t inform his community, because she was too overwhelmed by his illness, and didn’t want his death to find purchase in anyone’s mind. She couldn’t deal with her husband’s upcoming death, and would never have knowingly let anyone else.

Through my friends blunder, she had become more knowingly self-compassionate, and provided a community of others a chance to love a beloved member of their circle. It was an exquisite error. And it reveals a deeper, even more ephemeral truth that is poorly recognized in this world of personal responsibility. Spirit acts through us, sometimes deviating from our well-worn manners, and embarrassingly taking over, to do things that we wouldn’t dream of.

Upon hearing this story, I invited my friend to join the Blunder Brothers. She retorted, could a woman be a brother? Of course, I responded, calling ourselves ‘brothers’ just reveals how badly, and usually, we blunder. The truth is, Spirit, The Great Mystery, determines who gets in, and by what egregious and miraculous route.

With this story in mind, I want to invite you to consider that some of your best mistakes, the one’s you won’t forgive yourself for, might just be your passport into The Blunder Buddies.

Happiness Is A Choice

I’m a somewhat lugubrious guy. The state of the world has tended to leave me feeling on edge and uncertain. Even though I am daily impressed by the miraculousness of life, I have a certain doubt about my being happy in the face of so much suffering. I feel some heart-breaking complicity. None of these feelings are rational, but they never-the-less invade my equilibrium, and affect my pleasure about being here. So, you probably can imagine how uncertain I was, when I opened John Leland’s book entitled, Happiness Is A Choice You Make. I was prepared for another New Age bromide.

John had gripped my attention with his sub-title. He promised that he was    reporting the results of spending a year with the “oldest old.” Their voices mattered to me. His writing floored and chastened me. Now I can’t recommend this book enough. You see, I found wisdom in the natural creativity of elders, who were living with the usual difficulties of getting old. There is nothing panaceac about the lives of the six old (85 to 92 years of age) people he chronicled. Physical ailments, isolation, alienation, immobility, and the insult of cultural irrelevance haunted each of them. They were typical old people, who each had achieved happinessnot despite the difficulties of aging, but because of them.

As I read the variety of challenges they each faced, I came up against the hard lives of the old folks I know. Broken bodies, with wandering minds, hapless, unbalanced and falling — they created within themselves a way to enjoy what remained after the losses that came with life. That impressed and heartened me. They found in the present (so they didn’t have to remember anything) a way to enjoy whatever came their way. In the end, their love of life, and amazement before it, overcame the many challenges that living thrust upon each of them.

The book is well written, it presents a sober look into the lives of the oldest of us. But most importantly, it reveals the incredible happiness that comes from being human in the face of so much uncertainty and vulnerability. Happiness is a choice, a uniquely made attitude, derived from living intensely within the cauldron of life. Amazingly, what cripples and reduces us, also provides the little blessings, which make life surprisingly delicious.

There is no formula, no well-worn path, no way of predicting this non-rational joy, but it exists anyway. Having the good fortune to get old seems to help, but it is what one does with that piece of luck that seems to ensure the joyful outcome. Interestingly, the book reports that research on aged brains (through fMRI) shows that they are like the brains of life-long meditators. They have the benefit of a kind of natural mindfulness. Still, joy is not guaranteed. Happiness is idiosyncratic, it is something that is personal, existing in the relationship between any particular human heart and the deep mystery behind existence.

Knowing happiness is possible —and that it comes through Life and not despite it — is so freeing. It is not a condition of the world. Happiness is more durable than that. It lives in a place beyond the world, beyond the sadness of the way we treat each other, beyond even the way we treat the miracle of life itself. It is nestled within us, as a potential, unleashed by our own availability. Choosing it — is choosing it all — life and death, hardship and joy, evolution and the grace built into each moment.

Rapturous Difficulties

I have a friend, an older wiser man than I, who starts out things he says by making the following disclaimer,  “I don’t know jack shit about what I’m talking about.” Neither, do I. Brain-damage, however, lets me go into areas I know to little about, and where angels fear to tread.  This is one of them.

A few days ago a friend sent me a list of all the things he is grateful for. It was a beautiful list including things like; a long-term marriage, two incredible kids, a magnificent home. He had so much to be grateful for, that he actually worried that at age 50, he might have already lived a full life, and might not have more. It was amazing how rich with gratitude his life was, and how much he knew he benefited.

That evening, as I was going to sleep, I found myself thinking about him, and his list of gratitudes. I was surprised. To my astonishment, I found myself uneasy with his list. Something was missing. After a great deal of reflection, and some hours of wakefulness, I discovered what it was. There was nothing on his list that expressed gratitude for hardships.

The darkness created me. Suffering did more to teach me than anything. What I had no control of, and played no intentional part in, did more to shape me than most everything else. It was my life’s twists, the turns I didn’t expect, that tested me, and taught me my worth. These things too, I am grateful for, perhaps all the more, because they were the work of providence. I grew in ways I did not intend, but never-the-less benefited from.

It is this, the dark work of the invisible hands, the ones that trimmed my sails, and cast me into unknown oceans I would have never have knowingly sailed, that fiercely graced me — pulling me into a form unexpected — that I am humbled by, and most grateful for. I was thrust beyond myself, forced to deal with things that existed way beyond my control. 

These hardships, my stroke, the failed marriages, the potential I didn’t actualize, these did more to educate and sensitize me than any of my successes. It was a dark God, the cursed one— who interrupted my plans, asking what seemed impossible of me — that lead me home. My life, I have come to know, is not my life, it is Life’s life, and this is what I am most grateful for now: the difficulties that have shaped me.

I am more thoroughly human, because Life wrung the hubris out of me, making me more humble than I would have ever been if left to my own devices. I now walk (roll) with the weight of vulnerability and grace always haunting me, reminding me how quickly things can turn, and forcing me to recognize this small, but somehow exalted place I get to inhabit for a while.

The difficulty, as undesirable as it is, seems to make it all more real.  The hardships have graced me with a certain awareness of how “Lucky” I truly am. I wouldn’t have chosen what has brought out the best in me. But, I can be grateful, for that churlish wise one, loved me enough, to add hurt and disappointment to my depths.

Post Traumatic Growth

This is disturbing. So much so, that I had a hard time sleeping last night. In a moment you’ll know why. I hope you are disturbed too.

I imagined, as I was preparing to write, that I might entitle this piece “Uncommon Sense.” But, I’ve already written something with that title. I was drawn to that way of entitling this missive, because it was a play on Thomas Paine’s revolution inducing essay, “Common Sense.” I realized last night that what is here is revolutionary. Here’s why.

This line of thought started when I was watching the Newshour on PBS. In a feature segment called “In My Humble Opinion,” a guest addressed trauma. She said essentially that trauma survivors were more traumatized by the reactions of the ones around them. By being treated as damaged by their loved ones, they came to believe themselves damaged, and to correspondingly suffer like they were. The power of social belief was so great it piled insurmountable hurt upon them. Only those intact enough, within themselves, had any immunity to these social views.

She was not traumatized, although she had been through two wars in Africa, and had come to America as a black woman. She was solid enough to speak out on TV, about what appeared to her, as a powerfully defining and painful social force. Only by defining herself, had she resisted becoming the quivering survivor of harrowing events, defined (by herself and others) as forever tainted by what she had been through. Her support system was prepared to provide her with a life sentence, as someone traumatized. She was savvy enough to know that form of help didn’t help, in fact, it could hurt her, if she let it.

Thank heavens she went beyond conventional practices, and made her voice heard. She named our social belief structure for the disabling agent it sometimes is. There are people walking around now, who are wearing the scars of these misbegotten assumptions. You may be one of them.

I consider knowing this disturbing, because I can see the same thing happening to old people. The societal assumption is that the old person is headed down hill in an inevitable decline. There seems to be an invisible funnel, which envisions old people headed down, into the narrowing end. Ageist beliefs end up channeling most of the elderly into diminishment. A few, intact enough to resist, exhibit post-traumatic growth and demonstrate the realization that the funnel is actually the other way round. Aging unleashes unimagined potential. They grow until they dissolve into a greater way of being.

Social beliefs, are disabling, far more so, than disturbing events. This is a painful truth, one that is truly traumatizing. Old people thrive when they escape the debilitating assumptions of common ignorance. Mass mind — the beliefs that define a culture — evoke a reality that makes post-traumatic growth difficult, but not impossible. The ones who have escaped, say more about themselves than us, but as a minority, they say enough about us, to be revolutionary wisdom.

Graying challenges us — to go beyond the traumatizing beliefs of a culture, mad with the assumptions of adulthood—and to become, not the discarded drone, but a real human being. The old beliefs don’t help. But, there are fresh assumptions, even not knowing, that offer a child-like new beginning, and mesmerizing new potentials. Thanks to post-traumatic growth, a new enchanted world is becoming more obvious.

I hope, that knowing of the power of collective ignorance, disturbs you, it does me.