“Hold To What Is Difficult” by Lucky

I stumbled across the words above many years ago. I didn’t know who Rainer Marie Rilke was then. But, his words had an effect upon me. I think at the time they were just so contrary I remembered them, and even more strangely took them to heart. Now, looking back, I’m surprised by the impact they have made on me, and even more surprised that I had the wisdom to have remembered and even navigated by them. That peculiar delight, is not the reason I am choosing to reflect on these words, and the experience they embody, instead I am compelled to look at how they capture something about our lived experience, that I find somewhat miraculous. In the difficult, I find, there lives a grace that changes everything.

As you may know, I have grown to believe that my life is not my own. My so-called life is Life’s life. The rigors of a life lost, and the advent of a disabled/enabled life, made all of this clear to me. I am a representative of Life, whether I like it, or not. Life has brought me back to being human again. And, this time, I’m feeling so much more, and I’m aware like I never have been. I seem to have a kind of non-conventional awareness I would never have cultivated.  I exist here, but not like I would ever have imagined. My mind seems to have a wild canniness. This leaves me breathless, embarrassed, wondering, and so awed. I like it, am often afraid of what comes to light, and I never feel abandoned, orphaned, or alone. The Universe seems to me to be both my playground, and the one playing me.

All of that contributes to my returned attention to what is difficult. There is something here, some twisting, mobilous, mystery that makes me want to sit-up and pay attention. I have been roughed up by Life. I don’t have any illusions about that. I was hurting, afraid, and pissed off for a long time. Sometimes, like for instance when I’m struggling to get dressed, or I can’t for the life of me understand something I know is simple, or I have dropped something on the floor for the third time, then I can still get pissed. But, more often now, I just laugh. Life, being me, is ridiculously impossible, yet here I am.

Life has really come through the hardships of my life. I have been changed, amplified, challenged to my core, concentrated, baffled, and made more whole while being reduced to a quivering mass. None of it was my doing. Life just picked me up by the back of my neck and did me over. I went along…… crying, hopeless, helplessly quaking, and thinking there must be a better way. There never was, and I’m coming to believe, there may never be.

Life delivered what was left of me, to a different, better state. Someone asked me recently if I could do it over, would I prefer anything different? “No,” I said. It seems Life roughed me up, just right. Since then I’ve come to believe that Life is the Teacher, Guru, Enlightened Being, nudging me toward home. And, I now see that Life has a repertoire of stimulants that goes way beyond what I would wish on my worst enemy.

“Hold to what is difficult” Now I take these words of Rilke, to mean that where life seems to be cracking up, it is probably cracking open. This is, as the poet Leonard Cohen points out, “where the light gets in.” From where I sit now, the personal breakdowns, painful relationship snags, and group times of chaos, are all the breakout of Life. It may be asking more of us then we can deliver, but it isn’t abandoning us. The difficult is actually Life.

Life frequently asks more of me than I want. Life can be a nuisance that way. Sometimes, mostly, I resent it. Once in a great while, I feel grateful. Life keeps stretching, and ripening me. I actually grow up. It is all somewhat unbelievable!  The thing I don’t want to go through, is just the exact thing I have to go through, to be a me, worth being. There is a kind of symmetry and strange inhuman justice here that just silences me.

No one could have adequately explained any of this to me. My parents, probably in their deepest roots, were as baffled as I am. Sadly, I think they succumbed to the virulent, and rampant belief, that something must be wrong with them (or the rest of us) if the miraculous wasn’t obvious. I can forgive them.  Can I forgive me, you, the rest of us? Yep, if I am willing to hold to what is difficult.

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For more pieces like this, go to www.elderssalon.blogspot.com (2010 thru 2013) and http://www.elderssalon2.blogspot.com  (2014 on)

To hear archived versions of our radio program Growing An Elder Culture go to www.elderculture.com

To read excerpts, or otherwise learn, about Embracing Life: Toward A Psychology of Interdependence go to http://www.davidgoff.net

Solitude & Love by Lucky

I’m taking a six-week break in my relationship.  My partner and I have agreed that each of us wants this time off, to balance our relationships with ourselves, with our relationships with each other. This move is re-introducing me to un-diluted solitude. I’m finding something in my solitude I didn’t expect, I hoped for it, but didn’t know what would be possible for me. I’m finding, there is a relationship between how I feel about me, and how I feel about my significant other. Solitude is deepening both. Through this process, I’m learning that being alone, which is difficult, grows my relationship with me, which in turn, grows my regard for her.

There seems to be some paradoxical relationship between solitude and love. The more I am alone, and come to love myself more, the more love I have for my partner. This sounds like some kind of fusion, a confusion of our being mixed together, but it actually only evolves when we are apart. Go figure! Life has apparently set-up an elegant paradox with very exacting parameters. “Know Thyself” becomes “Love Your Neighbor.” But, only if I spend the time alone to really get to know myself.

Take for example freedom. My partner is more free to be herself, more free to find out for herself what that means, because I can handle being alone. My time alone liberates her, as she is figuring out for herself her own liberation. A friend of mine calls this “co-liberation.” To me, this is what relationship is really all about.

The German poet Rilke correlates loving with solitude. He points out a special aspect of solitude, which if cultivated, is to “become world.” “Become world in him [or her] self, for the sake of another.” The idea of becoming your self, and containing the world, for another, is the ultimate in expansion and freedom. The whole idea of becoming fully one’s self, being the development that frees the other, is counter – cultural. Isn’t love supposed to be a multiple-party thing? Isn’t it about mutuality and collaboration? It seems that there is a connection, but it is more complex than just being about holding hands and cooperating.

I find being alone, even when I am able to turn it into solitude, hard. The hours seem to scold me, and I feel challenged to find the creativity to engage my self. The day can stretch out, and I am often revealed in ways I wouldn’t have guessed at. The mirror of solitude, for me, has been flawless, despite my protests. Strangely, I like this. Self-revelation tends to sober me, and settle me down. My anxiety about myself abates. I have a more accurate picture to work from, and that, despite not always being pleasing, sets me to working on what really matters about my life. Plus, each night I tuck myself into bed, and I know my life is being lived out, the best I can.

This thing about becoming myself, and that being the most loving thing I can be doing for my partner, awes me. I want her to know I am real. I want her to know that when I touch her, the world is saying “you belong.’’ I want her to feel movement inside, some sense that the Universe is moving too. None of these things are possible, so I’m learning, without my experiencing them in my solo life. It is in such moments, moments alone, where I experience the invisible link that joins us, and I know that all along we have been part of something larger than us, that joins us to one another. It is alone that I am more likely to cry from that knowing.

Solitude also breaks my heart. It reminds me of the real benefit of remembering my existential aloneness every moment. I don’t know about you, but I would just as soon forget how alone, and responsible I am, for my own life. That forgetting, which I do all the time, is revealed in my solitude, to be the reason I don’t recall the miracle that attends our being together. When I forget all of that, I treat us both with disregard. I miss the miracle that is going on.

Solitude isn’t just freeing for my partner. I guess that is what is so compelling about it. I walk taller (in this case, sit taller) through this life, when I admit, and this only happens when I love what the Universe has created in me, that my being here is no accident. I may not know why I’m here, but I know, that despite all the bad scientific advice I’m getting, I belong. I’m the universe expanding in a totally unexpected way. So are you. Imagine that!  I do, especially when I am alone.

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For more pieces like this, go to www.elderssalon.blogspot.com (2010 thru 2013) and http://www.elderssalon2.blogspot.com  (2014 on)

To hear archived versions of our radio program Growing An Elder Culture go to www.elderculture.com

To read excerpts, or otherwise learn, about Embracing Life: Toward A Psychology of Interdependence go to http://www.davidgoff.net

Message To A Young Activist by Lucky

I was born in 1948. (On flag day, to a military family.)  I lived on, or near, Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases all my childhood. I first became aware of the atomic bomb when I was 10. It was always on the bases where I lived.  My Dad was missing for months during the Cuban missile crisis. My first concern was nuclear annihilation. It wasn’t until after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, that I became aware of the virulence of the environmental devastation I saw around me. It was during those years, when I didn’t expect to live to be 30, that I became an activist.

That means that I have been aware of devastating things about human nature for over 50 years now. I emphasize that, because I’ve aged in this world, which always seems to be teetering on the edge. During those many years, I’ve repeatedly felt great urgency. I’ve seen something of the greatness of humankind, and had years to wonder, at this specie’s destructive tendencies. My sense of justice has been sorely disappointed. And, as I awaken today,  at 66, I am a man who has grown up under the shadow of our kind’s carelessness.

Over these years, I’ve attended many protests, meetings, and participated in a variety of actions. I’m still doing so. The reason for this note is to let you know that during that time I’ve learned something. As a result of how life has progressed, and matured me, my activism has changed. I went from an angry (and scared) young person, full of righteous indignation, to a much more humble and strategic old man. Activism has become more about how I engage in daily life. Now, all of my actions happen here where I am. I am the agitator and the agitated.

There is a split in the activist community, a painful and debilitating one. The fault line seems to run between those out on the protest lines, and those in, looking at their own culpabilities. These two distrust and undermine each other, and even deny that they are related. This hurts the coherence and effectiveness of movement. It has become a great source of pain for me, hearing anyone disparage someone else. The inner and the outer are both part of the same continuum. Cut either one of them off— devalue any expression of peace — and you have a differing, but equally unjust, form of oppression.

It has taken me a long time to learn that lesson. I didn’t have, what I call now, the ballast of maturity to keep me from acting in a distorted way. My behavior, in addition to inadvertently aiding what I fought, was frequently unjust. That pains and humiliates me. Because of the pain, humiliation, and loss to my self-image, I have come to realize how hard it is to see the cost of this one-sided approach. I really despair when I perceive activists treating each other as if there is only one right way to engage. And, I don’t know how to tree-sit the tree sitters.

So, here is the essence of this message. I am flabbergasted about how to proceed. It took me a long time to learn about the value of integrating inner and outer. I think others deserve the same chance to learn, in their own time. But, waiting around for others, to age into a different perspective, adds to the fire, the perception that the fire brigade is caught up in shooting water as much at each other, as at the fire. This awareness is hard to bear. So, I reach out, and write about this dilemma, because I hope others will perceive it, and also speak out, and I hope that in some way, I can shorten the learning time of those I pray for.

I have learned to live a life that is filled with tension. The central reality of my time, here on Earth, has been the paroxysms of pain and disappointment about the degradation of our home. It violates the environmental ethic I picked up as a boy: “Leave the campsite better than what you found.”  I am not in favor of mass suicide. Nor am I in favor of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Some of us are have learned to be persistent, patient, and pained. The world — our birth place — is calling. It is praising those who feel moved to help it, and it is exhorting them to come to the task naked, shorn of human certainty.

Aging has taken away my activist’s clothes. It has left me naked, wrinkled, stooped, and still alive, perceiving the miraculousness of this creation, and calling out with the world. Life has come, is here, and will go. Now is our chance to provide the honor it deserves, and we can best do that, through honoring each other.

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For more pieces like this, go to www.elderssalon.blogspot.com (2010 thru 2013) and http://www.elderssalon2.blogspot.com  (2014 on)

To hear archived versions of our radio program Growing An Elder Culture go to www.elderculture.com

To read excerpts, or otherwise learn, about Embracing Life: Toward A Psychology of Interdependence go to http://www.davidgoff.net

Between by Lucky

Deepening the Wonder

Death is a favor to us,

but our scales have lost their balance.

The impermanence of the body

Should give us great clarity,

Deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes

Of this mysterious existence we share

And are surely just traveling through.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,

Hafiz would call for drinks

And as the Master poured, I would be reminded

That all I know of life and of myself is that

We are just a midair flight of golden wine

Between His Pitcher and His Cup.

If I were in the Tavern tonight

I would buy freely for everyone in this world

Because our marriage with the cruel beauty

Of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,

but our minds have lost their balance.

The miraculous existence and impermanence of

            Form

Always makes the illumined ones

            Laugh and sing.

                                    --Hafiz

Between Birth and Death lie the provinces of Life. But what if, between Death and Birth, there lay other provinces of Life? What if, Life incorporated it all? Then Death might in fact be a favor to us. As the poet Wendell Berry says Death might bring a “solving justice.”

Death, in our culture is not considered an ally. It just seems to rob us of a chance to go on doing what we are doing (sometimes, rather messily). But, Death actually puts people out of their misery. I don’t mean we are all miserable. But, rather, that there seems to be something about these provinces of Life, that are hard, stressful, full of tension and uncertainty. All of it makes being human hard and humbling. The lack of a Death that serves any useful, good purpose leaves too many of us dreading it. And, to too many, it is a sign of failure, or of something being wrong.

But, what if, instead, something is right? Death may be, like the mystic poem suggests, a favor to us. No one knows for sure, but it certainly is telling, that we have come around to convincing our selves how bad and scary this mystery is. Death seems to be a reflection of our rather skewed imagination. Perhaps, it is a phenomenon that does what we cannot — that is, stop. Life is so frenetic. Death is the final resting place.

I’m tired too. Getting older seems to take a lot of energy. But, Death doesn’t seem so frightening anymore, actually, I kind of look forward to it. I’m not exactly eager for it, but I am re-assured that it is inevitable. I like the idea of “solving justice,” and peace, and I don’t see any other path that seems to lead in that direction. As I grey and wither, I wonder about many things, and I find myself returning to the compassionate nature of Life, that in every case, it includes an inevitable death.

A friend of mine recently said, “Death enables evolution to happen.” We were conjecturing upon the possibility that existence, in the human sense, might be the only place where learning and evolution takes place. What if, we speculated, Death actually is pretty easy, and that the difficulty of Life is the only place where souls can advance, learn, and serve as evolutionary agents? Then living, especially a life that required some creativity, would be such a privilege, a challenging opportunity. Maybe the time in between is so easy and effortless that it doesn’t serve the growth of consciousness, the expansion of the Universe and Creation.

I think that Death in the words of George Bush, has been “misunderestimated.” To me, it seems very likely that Death is a gift to us. A spiritual passageway where the ego dies and the actual seed of our personal uniqueness passes on, into another, larger ecology. I suspect that the drama of Life there, in that existence, will be even more compelling, than the one which prepared us. Life goes on. And what lives in the cracks, between Death and Birth? That is the real question.

I believe, between Death and Birth lay other provinces of Life.

Unknowing II by Lucky

I’ve written elsewhere about what I call “unknown wisdom” (see The Age of Actualization pgs. 172 thru 176). But here, I want to concentrate upon the particular set of traits, that many old folks have (without even knowing it), that add-up to a generative relationship with the unknown. You see, for far too long, the nature of ageism, has obscured, even to old folks, the value of the advent of ‘not knowing’ in the elder population.

There is a stage of awareness that extends beyond conventional forms of consciousness. This is something rarely noted in our usual social discourse. Developmental scientists, and gerontologists, are just beginning to notice. I call this form of maturity,  non-conventional consciousness. What that means is that some old folks have a particular savvy and creative way of looking at things, but they have been misperceived and silenced by well-meaning others. Our society has lost, like all societies that don’t value their elders, a great deal, in terms of perspective, but particularly, in terms of a more positive attitude towards the unknown future.

Not knowing sets in, when the aged begin to realize that what they know is insufficient to address this miraculous world. Some old people actually go beyond the ideologies of the day, partly because of how alone and isolated they are, and partly because their experiences, particularly of hardship, have introduced them to the unreality of our socially-constructed reality. These few are literally in the world we all occupy, but not of it.  They see vividly what most of us are only dimly aware of.  The unknown, perhaps because they are facing death, is particularly on their radar screen. It turns out, that in latter life, at least for some people, Life is more like being in wonderland, than many of us suspect.

The ability to find comfort in not knowing is not dementia, or even Alzheimer’s, but a particularly humble way of being fully alive and present. By in large, to we confined in the conventional agreed upon world, this mode of perception looks too eccentric, and crazy. And, by seeing it that way, we tend not to see the real value it holds for our species evolution. The unknown comes knocking every day, and we want to treat it like yesterday’s visitor, because that offers us reassurance, and because we want to fit in. The old, by and large, are well beyond those concerns. So they see the stranger for what it is, and tend to welcome the unknown into their lives.

Freedom from the constraints of normality, sometimes results in the realization of those freed, that normality is only a preparatory stage. When this happens, there are those who are willing to take full responsibility for themselves, and are available to see the world in its naked, unknown, glory.  To them, the unknown is a curious phenomenon, full of possibility; a potential relative, the ultimate resort and the best resting place, because it offers a fresh new beginning. The unknown paradoxically looks full compared with dimming emptiness of the past.

There is a kind of creativity that is available to the experienced mind, the one that’s been around the block a few times, that is unique and incredibly informative. Not only is known wisdom more solidly rooted in such an experience, but unknown wisdom, the kind that is needed to face a future that is different than the past, is also more likely.

There is nothing like falling through the cracks to alert one to what is missing. Old folks, especially in cultures that are indifferent to the possibilities inherent in aging, have to find their own way, and in so doing, develop some of the very survival skills that are most needed. And, being aware of the fecundity of the unknown, and learning to pay attention to it, is one of those skills.

Unknowing is an asset of this species. Our adaptability has waxed and waned as we have related with the unknown. The old are our vanguard. They are the real veterans amongst us, they serve everyday they are alive, and they could make a vital difference in our efforts to survive. Life has programmed some of them to survive for just this kind of moment. The darkness around our kind is deep right now, the known paths have been explored and are exhausted, it is important that some of our veterans be involved, to see what we have done, and to serve best, by staring into the unknown.

The future is by its nature unknown.  So too, are many of the attributes of the age we are now achieving. Old people are discovering what’s possible in that unknown — it’s likely that what they are discovering, is some of our future.