Life is fragile.
'Fragile' is its most descriptive word, I think. The only other word that remotely qualifies is 'elusive'.
Now I speak of earthly life, that is to say, 'creaturely' life, and not Divine Life. The Divine Life is anything but fragile. And yes, the Divine Life is different from our life.
And I use the meaning of the word 'life' as in statements human beings make such as 'life is....' - that is, in a kind of descriptive sense, not definitional. 'Life is a shortbread butter cookie', though most formidably unanswerable, can hardly be definitional, I think, even if expressed by a two-year old.
Life, someone famously said, is what happens when you're not looking. I might say, of the one who said it, 'a famous person once famously said, with insight that I had not thought him capable of'.
Anyways. Somehow I agree. The moment I start trying to 'catch' life or distill it into repeatability, it hides or dies. It happens surreptitiously when no one is looking. And once it happens, it might almost said, it's almost impossible to simulate or repeat, even under conducive conditions, like death can. You can go on killing someone, for example, when the circumstances are favourable, such as no resistance, and so on. But you cannot go on creating life. Once life dies, it cannot be resurrected.
Now I must say again, I speak not of the Divine Life, nor of the Divine Life in some of us. I speak of the stuff of earthly life, creaturely life, in a descriptive sense.
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Will I ever be able to play the piano quite like I did, on a specific occasion? Will I always be able to find the words for each successive situation, as I did for a specific one? Will I always be able to express myself with the scalpel-sharp precision and blessed economy of words as I once did?
Will she always look at me like she once did? Will I always have the 'absolutely right' friend to be with me as my circumstances need as I once did?
Will there again be an hour before sunset as magical as yesterday's? Will my favourite mountain always look the same? Will the clouds be as magical tomorrow? Will the light catch my garden as magically as it did that day? Will the rain be as absolutely delightful and opportune on another day as it was on that day?
Will my two year-old always look as loveable as when she was two? Will my teenager ever ask a question with the same maddeningly bewitching innocence as he did once?
Will this life be as enjoyable if I had it again? (a big 'if', as it usually turns out)
*******************************************
Yes, it is like catching a soap bubble to weigh it on a scale. Like a mad scientist who once weighed a man just before and after he died and concluded that the human soul weighs 21 grams.
Life is unique, unrepeatable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. It will have its way.
You can alter it perhaps, but you can't have it again. Opportunities for adjustment are not infinite, nor will they be available forever.
*******************************************
There is one thing we can do, however. We can NOTICE. And once we do, we can enjoy it. Life may be a moment, but what a tragedy if we fail to notice.
Since it is what happens when we're not looking, let's make our looking count.
This could just mean taking a half hour to walk in a garden between 4:45 P.M and 5:15 P.M on a day when it rained in the afternoon and then the sun came out. There were still dull-grey clouds in the sky, but every one of them had a silver lining and the dappled sunlight touched every single green leaf. You missed it today? Okay, you tell yourself, I'll see it tomorrow. And then..... it rained all day for years after that and the sun never came out.
It could mean spending an hour with a two year-old without trying to change him in any way. Letting yourself be and letting him be. So what if he wrecked the house? So what if he put the ice cream into the chicken broth and insisted on drinking it? And what if, in the middle of all of that, he called your name just once, plaintively, melting your resistance? Yes, there is tomorrow. But this happened today, and you didn't notice? What a horrid little lifeless creature you must be!
It could mean catching a ratchetty 85 year-old in a particularly reflective and chatty mood. You thought she had just gone senile, didn't you? What if the time you spent with her helped her stay in a good mood for many days afterwards? Yes, there is always tomorrow, but why are you counting on it when you know better? How many tomorrows anyway?
It could mean making paper planes in the office for ten minutes. It's a scientific thing, you know. It's not easy to make those turning planes turn. Yes, there is tomorrow, but what if there's no more paper, or no more time?
It might mean that I visit Kilimanjaro before I die, for example. Or Jerusalem.
The stuff that life is made of - all of it, comes with an enjoy-before date. And you can never know or change that date to suit yourself. If you missed it you missed it and you can only hope you make it before the enjoy-before date, while there's still time.
It amazes me how much time I've spent trying to make people 'see'. In the words I use. In the pictures I paint. In the photos I take. In notes I play. I've not always been successful. Part of that is because I am a farcical bungler and a bad workman, but an equal part of that is because people are as obstinate as mules, blind as bats, short-sighted as tyrants, jaundiced as prejudice and bigotry, unforgiving as granite, or just plain unwilling to stop and notice life.
**************************************
There's another type of person, who wants to CONTROL life. This kind of person wants to capture it, cage it, auto-play to someone else so he can gain from it and extort the price of enjoyment from another.
This kind of person also wants to see how much life can be squeezed out of every situation, every resource, every person, every enjoyable thing, every pleasure.
This kind of person gets drunk on repeatability and return on investment.
This kind of person will just never understand that life is free, that it can be given away but never hoarded, profiteered from, captured, bought, sold, monopolized, patented, branded, and so on and so on .........
It never occurs to such persons that life cannot be captured. It will not be caged. You don't create life; you just enjoy it. And a huge, huge part of that enjoyment comes from helping others enjoy it too. There can never be any "net" life. All of it either gets noticed and enjoyed (and so used up), or a good part of it is wasted. No one sees and no one knows it, so no one can enjoy it. It can never be created again, at least not by human beings.
Do you find yourself spending all your waking hours doing math, even perhaps for a living? Being fascinated by constructs and contrivances (read as technology)? Solving problems? Casting a leering eye on any hoard-able, profitable thing (including people)? Measuring everything? Trying to put 'life' on screen in a 'reality show'? A shameless opportunist? Caged by your own desires for yourself?
THAT. THAT is what the famous someone meant when he said life is that which happens when you're not looking. Life WILL pass you by, because it is fragile. Perishable. You cannot HANDLE it and make it malleable like a tangible thing. You cannot measure it or engineer it to happen again.
***************************************
If we would come to our senses, we would treat life tenderly, because it is so fragile. It is seriously hampered by short-sighted people, and disappears altogether among empiricists. We would stop trying to 'make it pay' and 'valuate' it to justify its existence. Our touch on the world would be a divine touch, an imprint so soft and beautiful that we would indeed leave this world a better place.
I've met far too many whose touch on life is crushing, a weight it cannot bear.
Go gentle.
'Fragile' is its most descriptive word, I think. The only other word that remotely qualifies is 'elusive'.
Now I speak of earthly life, that is to say, 'creaturely' life, and not Divine Life. The Divine Life is anything but fragile. And yes, the Divine Life is different from our life.
And I use the meaning of the word 'life' as in statements human beings make such as 'life is....' - that is, in a kind of descriptive sense, not definitional. 'Life is a shortbread butter cookie', though most formidably unanswerable, can hardly be definitional, I think, even if expressed by a two-year old.
Life, someone famously said, is what happens when you're not looking. I might say, of the one who said it, 'a famous person once famously said, with insight that I had not thought him capable of'.
Anyways. Somehow I agree. The moment I start trying to 'catch' life or distill it into repeatability, it hides or dies. It happens surreptitiously when no one is looking. And once it happens, it might almost said, it's almost impossible to simulate or repeat, even under conducive conditions, like death can. You can go on killing someone, for example, when the circumstances are favourable, such as no resistance, and so on. But you cannot go on creating life. Once life dies, it cannot be resurrected.
Now I must say again, I speak not of the Divine Life, nor of the Divine Life in some of us. I speak of the stuff of earthly life, creaturely life, in a descriptive sense.
*******************************************
Will I ever be able to play the piano quite like I did, on a specific occasion? Will I always be able to find the words for each successive situation, as I did for a specific one? Will I always be able to express myself with the scalpel-sharp precision and blessed economy of words as I once did?
Will she always look at me like she once did? Will I always have the 'absolutely right' friend to be with me as my circumstances need as I once did?
Will there again be an hour before sunset as magical as yesterday's? Will my favourite mountain always look the same? Will the clouds be as magical tomorrow? Will the light catch my garden as magically as it did that day? Will the rain be as absolutely delightful and opportune on another day as it was on that day?
Will my two year-old always look as loveable as when she was two? Will my teenager ever ask a question with the same maddeningly bewitching innocence as he did once?
Will this life be as enjoyable if I had it again? (a big 'if', as it usually turns out)
*******************************************
Yes, it is like catching a soap bubble to weigh it on a scale. Like a mad scientist who once weighed a man just before and after he died and concluded that the human soul weighs 21 grams.
Life is unique, unrepeatable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. It will have its way.
You can alter it perhaps, but you can't have it again. Opportunities for adjustment are not infinite, nor will they be available forever.
*******************************************
There is one thing we can do, however. We can NOTICE. And once we do, we can enjoy it. Life may be a moment, but what a tragedy if we fail to notice.
Since it is what happens when we're not looking, let's make our looking count.
This could just mean taking a half hour to walk in a garden between 4:45 P.M and 5:15 P.M on a day when it rained in the afternoon and then the sun came out. There were still dull-grey clouds in the sky, but every one of them had a silver lining and the dappled sunlight touched every single green leaf. You missed it today? Okay, you tell yourself, I'll see it tomorrow. And then..... it rained all day for years after that and the sun never came out.
It could mean spending an hour with a two year-old without trying to change him in any way. Letting yourself be and letting him be. So what if he wrecked the house? So what if he put the ice cream into the chicken broth and insisted on drinking it? And what if, in the middle of all of that, he called your name just once, plaintively, melting your resistance? Yes, there is tomorrow. But this happened today, and you didn't notice? What a horrid little lifeless creature you must be!
It could mean catching a ratchetty 85 year-old in a particularly reflective and chatty mood. You thought she had just gone senile, didn't you? What if the time you spent with her helped her stay in a good mood for many days afterwards? Yes, there is always tomorrow, but why are you counting on it when you know better? How many tomorrows anyway?
It could mean making paper planes in the office for ten minutes. It's a scientific thing, you know. It's not easy to make those turning planes turn. Yes, there is tomorrow, but what if there's no more paper, or no more time?
It might mean that I visit Kilimanjaro before I die, for example. Or Jerusalem.
The stuff that life is made of - all of it, comes with an enjoy-before date. And you can never know or change that date to suit yourself. If you missed it you missed it and you can only hope you make it before the enjoy-before date, while there's still time.
It amazes me how much time I've spent trying to make people 'see'. In the words I use. In the pictures I paint. In the photos I take. In notes I play. I've not always been successful. Part of that is because I am a farcical bungler and a bad workman, but an equal part of that is because people are as obstinate as mules, blind as bats, short-sighted as tyrants, jaundiced as prejudice and bigotry, unforgiving as granite, or just plain unwilling to stop and notice life.
**************************************
There's another type of person, who wants to CONTROL life. This kind of person wants to capture it, cage it, auto-play to someone else so he can gain from it and extort the price of enjoyment from another.
This kind of person also wants to see how much life can be squeezed out of every situation, every resource, every person, every enjoyable thing, every pleasure.
This kind of person gets drunk on repeatability and return on investment.
This kind of person will just never understand that life is free, that it can be given away but never hoarded, profiteered from, captured, bought, sold, monopolized, patented, branded, and so on and so on .........
It never occurs to such persons that life cannot be captured. It will not be caged. You don't create life; you just enjoy it. And a huge, huge part of that enjoyment comes from helping others enjoy it too. There can never be any "net" life. All of it either gets noticed and enjoyed (and so used up), or a good part of it is wasted. No one sees and no one knows it, so no one can enjoy it. It can never be created again, at least not by human beings.
Do you find yourself spending all your waking hours doing math, even perhaps for a living? Being fascinated by constructs and contrivances (read as technology)? Solving problems? Casting a leering eye on any hoard-able, profitable thing (including people)? Measuring everything? Trying to put 'life' on screen in a 'reality show'? A shameless opportunist? Caged by your own desires for yourself?
THAT. THAT is what the famous someone meant when he said life is that which happens when you're not looking. Life WILL pass you by, because it is fragile. Perishable. You cannot HANDLE it and make it malleable like a tangible thing. You cannot measure it or engineer it to happen again.
***************************************
If we would come to our senses, we would treat life tenderly, because it is so fragile. It is seriously hampered by short-sighted people, and disappears altogether among empiricists. We would stop trying to 'make it pay' and 'valuate' it to justify its existence. Our touch on the world would be a divine touch, an imprint so soft and beautiful that we would indeed leave this world a better place.
I've met far too many whose touch on life is crushing, a weight it cannot bear.
Go gentle.
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