One Thing

In the movie “City Slickers,” Billy Crystal’s character asks Jack Palance’s character Curly, the old wizened cowboy, what the meaning of life is. Curly holds up his index finger.
“Your finger?”
“One thing,” Curly replies.
“Well, what is it?”
“That’s what you have to figure out.”

When my grandfather died, the room was filled with his wife and seven children. I say “filled” because it was not just their bodily presences, but also their love and memories that filled the room. My grandfather’s favorite Frank Sinatra CDs were playing. I got such a sense of that love, more so than the sadness, as he quietly slipped away. That was nearly 10 years ago. In that room, I discovered what my one thing is.

Today I attended another funeral. A lady who had a long and beautiful life, and died at 95. At this funeral was gathered the physical representation of that same one thing: her large family. They were laughing and crying at the same time. They shared memories of her love, graciousness, concern, cooking, and generosity. Two of her sons are jazz musicians. The second tangible manifestation of that one thing was hearing two of the songs her sons had created for her; inspired by her. To see love, to hear it. It was incredible.

Sometimes our vision of things gets distorted. Day to day, we get embroiled in the minutiae and fail to see the big picture or the long term. Sometimes, if we’re not careful, this can cost us what matters most. But some people are more clear-sighted. They are able to consistently see what is most important to them. They are able to ignore the distractions. This lovely lady never lost track of her one thing. I hope I will be as smart.

On Love

Let’s say you’re madly in love with someone, and suddenly one day this someone says that he or she does not love you anymore. You moan, cry, scream, rant and rave. That’s not the worst part. The worst part is the realization that your love does not go away. Here you are, left with these useless feelings and nothing to do with them. The best analogy I came up with for something that only works when shared is those friendship necklaces girls give each other. They usually have something like “Best Friends” imprinted on a circle, which is then cut into jagged halves. Each “best friend” wears half. The halves would fit back together perfectly if the friends were to stand nearby each other. But imagine that these are beautiful, rare pieces of jewelry, designed by the world’s most famous jewelry designer. They are museum-quality; encrusted with precious gems.

When the day comes that your special someone decides that he or she wants nothing more to do with you, what do you do with your half of the necklace? It’s all yours once again, but this is awkward and difficult because it’s meant to be shared. Out of anger, you could try to destroy and ruin this rare, valuable, special thing. Then, something beautiful and precious would be lost to you and the world. Worse still, it can never be disposed of. No matter how hard you try to prevent it, this twisted, ruined, corrupted thing keeps turning up, usually at the most inopportune moments.

Another option would be to keep it and obsess over it, filling your days with nothing but staring at it. You grow isolated and alone as others tire of your fascination with it. You may even lose all dignity trying to reunite the halves of the necklace. But this is a pointless and counterproductive exercise, and all you end up with is a lost self and a restraining order.

The third option is to keep it somewhere safe, yet work hard at preventing it from being the focus of your every thought and action. Over time (and this usually takes A LOT of time), it becomes less and less in the forefront of your mind. It finds its way into some box under your bed, covered in dust. Then one day someone else comes along, and lo and behold! He or she has the other half of another pair of necklaces. You get yours out and dust it off. The time has come to share it with someone else, and its beauty has been preserved for that person. It’s very hard at first because you are constantly reminded of the one you shared it with before. But as you spend time with your new someone, who in your mind is wonderful and perfect and superior to the old someone in every way, you forget the old someone a little. Then more and more, until most days, then months, then years pass without you thinking of the old someone even once. Your necklace comes to represent all the good things between you and your new someone- all the memories and laughs. Your necklace is not worse off for being old and having been through so much. On the contrary, it is even more rare and valuable, like a grandmother’s antique wedding ring worn by a new bride.

Now, if for some reason you are reminded of the old someone, you can choose to look back and see only the good things because there isn’t a broken, twisted necklace lying in wait somewhere, turning up again and again like a bad penny and ruining your day with its ugliness. Only representative of hurt and pain.

This is healing. Healing doesn’t mean forgetting, or burying, or getting rid of, or twisting the meaning of it in anger. Healing means transforming it into something you can live with, learn from, build on, and maybe be better for the next time around. Your love is a good and beautiful part of YOU that you give to someone else. Someone else can accept or reject it, but if they reject it, don’t give them the power to destroy that beautiful part of you. You cannot hurt that person anymore. You can only hurt yourself.

I’d imagine that someone at the end of their life would have collected a lot of half-pairs of necklaces. They would vary in value and degree of intricacy. Those who hold the other halves of the necklaces would not have them if this person had not existed. This person leaves in his or her wake a legacy of bits and pieces of valuable things. Some people naturally recognize the value, and recognize that they are better off for having it. Some do not, and throw them away or pawn them yet wind up with a poorer soul. Whether or not there is a heaven, perhaps we cannot know. But at least we can be certain that the bits of ourselves that we leave behind with others remain. In this way, we do have control over our “afterlife.” We are in complete control of how many necklaces we leave.

Life Philosophy

I’ve come to the realization that what I am in pursuit of is not so much a religion as a life philosophy. Pursuit is too mild. It is an obsession. This philosophy is a collection of ideas, some mine, some from others, that I think is the closest approximation to THE TRUTH. This is a radical departure for me, because until now I was looking for the answer between Catholic vs. Protestant vs. Lutheran vs. Episcopalian. Or even Catholic vs. Buddhism vs. atheism.

Can you be ok without being enfolded in the protective arms of organized religion? It is tough, terrifying for a former Catholic to accept that there are no hard and fast rules to be obeyed or you will go to hell. Having that pummeled into your head by parents, priests and scary nuns from before the time you could talk is a little tough to get over. But I think I need to stop dragging my feet and jump off that cliff now.

This life philosophy is not a bunch of things I believe. At least by the Catholic definition, belief requires “taking things on faith.” As in, you have no evidence, or evidence may even exist to the contrary, but somehow you just go ahead and believe it anyway. I’m beginning to think I’m incapable of belief by that definition.

So what is this life philosophy? It is a collection of ideas that ring absolutely true across all aspects of me. They line up with my makeup. Some of these ideas I have thought of myself, and some are others' ideas that I have encountered. Sometimes these ideas are not necessarily the ones I want. I would feel more comfortable if I could just be a good little Catholic. But that is tantamount to living a lie.

In addition, there are things that I can accept. These things may not really feel as true, but by virtue of their association to the truths, or by process of reasoning, they have to be. And some I simply want to be true. We all know the difference between an idea we can immediately accept, and an idea that someone had to talk us into. We can't find arguments to the contrary so we accept it for now, but in the back of our minds we always retain that little seed of doubt.

Here is what Feels True:

•Freewill: We are not controlled by fate, stars, God, or anything else. If we want something, we have to do the work for it. We are influenced by formative experiences, genetic makeup and our surroundings. The actions of other humans, and natural processes also have an impact. But this collection of circumstances exists for each person by chance, not because it's what we deserve. God, if he exists, limits his intervention to working through people who are open to His direction.
•There’s no one right way to live: Diversity works, and should not be feared (see Ishmael by Daniel Quinn). Open-mindedness is good. Prejudice is bad.
•Scientific Investigation: This cannot be in contradiction to God. If God exists, He set things into motion and made the rules. We can infer things about Him by studying the world (see The Story of B by Daniel Quinn). Data is never wrong. But our inferences and interpretations may be wrong.
•Altruism: The best way to be is altruistic. Nothing is going to get better unless people make it happen. Nobody or no thing is going to do it for us. Also, it is the responsibility of those who have attained higher level of human potential, or who have more resources, to help those with less. Also, by extension, taking from others is wrong. Using and abusing others is wrong.
•Middle Ground: Generally, the extremes aren’t the way to go. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. Also, people holding on to these extremes make dynamics that don’t work. Compromise works better.
•Our Relation to the Ecosystem: We are not the pinnacle, and we are not entitled to use it as we see fit. This statement is a summation of the belief of our culture which is absolutely false: "The world was made for man, and it is man's place to conquer and rule it." (see Ishmael by Daniel Quinn). It works just fine on its own, as it has for billions of years. We also are not here to take more than our share, or for the pursuit of our own pleasure. This point was driven home to me watching the movie “March of the Penguins.” Those animals live in abject misery with the exception of a few moments.
•Evolution: We didn’t start out perfect in any way and we continue to not be. Some might say that human evolution is working backward, because we have no innate ability to feed or defend ourselves anymore without our tools. But our tools are in the process of bringing about our own destruction.
•Human potential: If every child could be raised in some perfect environment, with the rare exceptions of the truly sociopathic, they’d turn out ok.

What I can accept:

•The existence of God: Seems like a nice, neat way to explain it all. I want to believe, but as I said, I’m starting to doubt that’s possible for me. And the very act of wanting to believe can be self-serving, which makes the whole thing suspect (see "Neverending Mental Wrestling Match). But since there’s no one right way, and we’re all different, we will all naturally have varying levels of the ability to “take things on faith.” So this must be ok.
•Afterlife: I just have to hope that there is point where all the wrongs are made right; some final justice. And that it doesn’t just end with death.


Now this doesn’t mean I live my life in perfect accordance with this philosophy, any more than a religious person is perfectly faithful to every single tenet. But I feel very uncomfortable with the incongruities. I should do more to share what I have with others. I could do more to be more mindful of the environment. Now, I don’t think everyone should leave the towns and go live in the caves any more than Quinn does, because we are too numerous to survive as hunter-gatherers. But we need to recognize where we’re going wrong and work to repair it. Live more closely like the way things are supposed to work. This is a process, and not all that we have achieved is bad. Music, art… Civilization was a step along the way, but it needs to be replaced with something that works better (see Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn).

I’m still hung up on right and wrong. I think killing is wrong, even though the natural world is not entirely populated by herbivores. And there are some inconsistencies. Sometimes my "truths" indicate that we should take our cues from the natural world, but sometimes we should be held to a higher standard. And if there’s no one right way, is there one Truth?

I had been hung up on “There’s no one right way to live.” I had been thinking that I must accept the converse: that there’s no wrong way to live. But something being true does not necessitate the veracity of the converse. The Mad Hatter wisely pointed out that the converse of a statement is "Not the same thing a bit! Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!" Of course there must be wrong ways to live. This is evidenced by every single species that ever went extinct.

And I felt that the middle ground thing is true, however I was confused because I happen to be on the extreme end of the environmental philosophy. Then suddenly I realized that I was only thinking in terms of THIS culture. If you create a scale that includes Native American or Aboriginal cultures, I am not on the extreme end at all.

I think that people who live life with an awareness of the divine seem to be more happy and content. Going to church helps get me there, not because of the rote repetition of doctrine, but because it helps one step into that mindset. You have to train your brain. No wandering off. And the fact that the people all around you are doing the same thing really helps too. So once you get good at it, you could go out into a forest or a mountaintop, or even see a tank full of baby mollies and feel connected to, at one with the divine. Tibetan monks, yogis, whatever the method is, it seems like a good thing to try to connect with a higher plane.

The God-works through-people-only thing still engenders a lot of questions. Again, if you’re all-powerful, why not fix everything? Maybe He's like the mother who gets tired of trying to fix everything for her 35 year old loser son living in her basement. But why not just send some absolute, unmistakable, irrefutable sign? Like writing it on the side of a mountain? And again, what about those who grew up never having any exposure to Christianity?

Obviously, one barrier to developing a life philosophy is the fact that anyone’s life experience is limited. How can you have an all-encompassing life philosophy if you haven’t experienced the whole of everything? Take me for example. My life has had its difficulties, but nothing I’d characterize as traumatic. I have been relatively sheltered, not at all what you’d call worldly, and have not traveled far from my hometown. So one strategy I use is to read. Another is to talk to people. This is fascinating to me. Having conversations with people who are very different from me. What will happen at the intersection of the optimistic Pollyanna and the jaded soldier? Or of the still relatively Christian ex-Catholic and the Wiccan? The trick is for these conversations to occur between open-minded people.

I have been unable to tackle the issue of Jesus as God's som. However, even if I ultimately could not accept that, I could still accept that He had some really wise things to say. So did Confucius and Buddha. So living in accordance with what they had to say, because I agree with what they had to say, is perfectly ducky without having to accept their divinity. Is this a cop-out? Maybe, but sometimes you just have to fake it 'til you make it.