Love Letter to 41:
I have taken to closing out the year on my birthday,
much like last year, but probably with much less to say. I made a deliberate effort to practice
silence, which will no doubt come as a surprise to mostly anyone who has shared
my company. I have managed to stay off
of Facebook for most of the year (with the exception of my single parents
group) and this has been a blessing. No
offense to anyone, it was just a huge time suck for me, a way to avoid the
things that I was supposed to be working on.
Also, not missing the toilet it became to express political opinions better
left unsaid.
That said, I will offer you my unsolicited opinions
(not political) for the past year. I
have acknowledged that I am an aging hipster. I am finding it harder to keep up. Like that Losing my Edge song. I am not even sure how to be pretentious
anymore. I say Dad things without
registering the irony, like when I took my oldest school shopping the night
before his first day of Junior High. We’re
in the Target and I guess he is either at an age where he cannot identify what
the cool kids are wearing, or possibly who the cool kids are, and maybe that
doesn’t matter anymore. God, that would be a blessing, if kids didn’t have to
think about that shit. I remember this
time of my life as Lord of the Flies. It
was at this point that I said the most Dad thing of the year. “Well do you want to go upstairs and look at
Dicks?” I could feel myself wincing mid-sentence,
completely recognizing what I was saying, and unable to retract the end of the
statement. Fortunately, he is better kid
than I was. He just sighed and hung his head. My Dad never would have said that. But that’s just because my Dad never took us clothes
shopping. That was on Mom, and I
guarantee you I would have yelled across the store “No Mom, I don’t want to go
upstairs and look at dicks.” I am fine
right here in the Sears husky section.
Opinion 1: Lana
Del Rey made the best album of the year.
As an aging hipster, I just wait for Pitchfork to release their best of
the decade list, and then I buy some of the stuff that I was supposed to be
listening to if I gave a shit about being cool anymore. I am also weirdly obsessed with that 212
song by Azealia Banks because of this list. She would ruin me.
Opinion 2: Cellophane by FKA Twigs is the most gorgeous
song I’ve heard in years. Seriously, I may have had tears in my eyes. The last
time I had that jaw dropping reaction to a song was the opening to Kid A.
Opinion 3: Big Thief is the best band playing right
now.
Opinion 4: The Marriage Story is the best movie of the
year, and easily the best movie ever written on divorce. I know people that actually had to shut it
off. I know a lot of divorced people. If you want, I will spend an hour talking to
you about the Beatles metaphors at the end. You will tell me that I am reading
way too much into it.
You might be wondering why I am writing and sharing
any of this. I am not sure that I have a
singular explanation, other than that when I commit to something, I see it
through to sufficiency. There were times where I was pretty sure this was a
journal. Then I got the idea that it was some type of action research project
that would intersect with my dissertation on Positive Psychology—some type of
meta-dissertation that I was living out in real time, like Synecdoche New
York. Bahahaha. I am blessed to have a certain level of
self-awareness about my own grandiosity.
Don’t get me wrong, I still have a hundred ridiculous thoughts a day,
but I only pursue about half of them now.
Some of the stoic literature sunk in.
I should give some space to the Tao. That’s what triggered all of this quasi-mystical
writing that began pouring out of me about two years ago. As expected, I am still making sense of year
40. I anticipated that in last year’s
goodbye letter—the one about spiritual rebirth.
I won’t go into great detail in this entry about how that stream
developed, it would take too long to sort it out, and I have journals I haven’t
even looked back on. I decided this year
to spend more time with silence, allow revelation to come rather than trying to
divine it. It was every bit is lovely,
maybe more so, sometimes the Tao is silent.
Otherwise it would not be the Tao.
Jess laughed when I shared that I attend a Zen meditation
and Quaker meeting weekly and that both are held in silence.
“How does that work?”
“umm, nobody says anything.”
“no, I mean how does that work for you? I can’t imagine.”
“I think that I have spent years looking for a way to
shut up.”
I suppose if there was a theme to this year it was
mastery. If you have actually found the Tao,
what more is there to do with it? If you
want a laugh--ask me to show you the weekly tracking system, in which I award
myself points for how faithfully I have executed the system. Mickey insists that I am too hard on myself.
She’s partially right, but only partially. I am nowhere near perfection.
This I will tell you: the journey you are on, may not
be the journey you are on. I write about
this shit because the past two years have been more than I could have imagined. I have no idea how practicing Zen brought me
to the Quaker church, but I can tell you this--when Tree of Life happened a
month later, I was in the space I needed to be to work out the agony and unrest
in my soul. There are things that can
only be done in silence.
Highlight of the year #1: Mike and Haley entrusted me
with delivering their wedding address. Crazy kids. Still the best thing I’ve written this
year. This blog post won’t come close.
Highlight of the year #2: aimed for four potlucks a
month, fell short. It was a worthy effort that will be resurrected in the
coming year. The thinking behind this was that I am working too much, and I miss
everyone and so if you build it “they” will come. And “they” will bring food
and beer and then some of that leftover food will make it into the kid’s
lunches. And my dinners. Me—I’m hanging by a thread. Still.
So here is the still life. I still managed a number of good reads (thanks
to the book club ^). Finally, got around
to reading Beloved, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Gilead. I read a bunch of theology, it’s really the
only thing that makes sense to me anymore. Of those books the one that will
have an enduring impact is The Cost of Discipleship. I confess that I had entirely misunderstood
faith until this reading. I am still not
sure I understand grace.
I am still writing, and accumulating a first-rate
collection of rejection notices!
I am still obsessed with T.S. Eliot’s final passage in
the Four Quartettes and Corinthians 13, both of which were essential to the architecture
of the Tao I speak of.
I am still obsessed with Walt Whitman. So was Allen Ginsburg. For good reason. There is something transcendent
here. I remember in the week that I laid
out the Tao I quoted him, I believe it was the lines from Song of Myself—“you
will hardly know who I am or what I mean.”
This proved true. And then the
year followed with all of the “I contain multitudes” writings, and my obsession
with the psychology of self. Would you
believe that I undertook a systematic effort to eliminate my ego through
meditation? Seriously, I read about a neuroscientist and practicing Buddhist
who was trying to eliminate his conceptualization of the “I.” I am not sure if he did. I’m not even sure this is what I was attempting. As you might guess, I think I fell short of
eliminating the ego. But, who knows,
things might look differently a month from now…next year’s entry…all I can say
is that around two years ago I set a fire, burned down everything behind me,
and went about rebirth. I write about this
shit because it forces something in me. There is a Gandhi quote about happiness
being when what you say is in harmony with what you do, and what you do is in
harmony with what you think. I write
because I want as I want as little daylight as possible between these versions
of selfhood. I find hypocrisy
intolerable. Dissonance is a sorry
state.
If you want to know miracles, as Whitman said:
“This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and
animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
Argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people…
Reexamine all that you have been told in school or
church or in any book,
Dismiss what insults your very soul,
And your flesh shall become a great poem.”
