It has been more than a week since I have written here. A lot is going on right now but the reason I have laid off has been my discomfort in seeing this blog turn into a more general journal than I wanted it to be.
The intention was to journal in regard to what I am coming to call the September 3 Experiment (or Discipline), the working of the program of Stephen Levine’s book.
I don’t feel that’s where it was really going. It was reflecting the fact that I am feeling pretty good about my life right now, despite a couple of pinches, here and there. It wasn’t what I intended it to be, so I have not been writing.
I have found the September 3 Discipline, here, to be difficult to distinguish from my normal spiritual discipline. That’s because it is based on a Buddhist practice and much of the discipline I brought to this endeavor is, too. This is, generally, not a new way of looking at things, for me. It is, rather, a refresher course in the basics. It is a reminder of why I do things the way I do, and where that orientation came from. It is a confirmation that actually reinforces my current tendency to vacillate between a smug comfort with my currently worldly condition (bad, bad, bad says the dualistic vision in white on my left shoulder) and my expedient means that sees such an attitude receding in the rear view mirror of my consciousness (so I am assured by the dualistic vision in red on right shoulder. You know, the one with the pitchfork).
Yes, I know. The great Roshi is raising its stick for a blow. When life looks like easy street there is danger at the door. If you want to make God laugh, tell it your plans. Blah, blah, blah.
That’s a longer term thing. It’s really the central thing.
There is one thing that this Discipline has added, though, and it’s a good thing.
Example.
Last Monday night Lynn and I went to the Fall Festival of Dance--the first event of the (long, long) dance team season. It’s RR’s second season of dance--something she decided to do that drove her father to some introspection and tried him, sorely.
She is not a dancer. Her dabbling in dance at an early age showed little natural talent and even less inclination. She dropped it and we went on with other activities in which she showed more interest and blossomed. Dedicating the amount of time necessary to be on the dance team--leaving aside whether she could compete with those who have been taking dance for the past ten years or so--would crowd out these more promising things in which she was involved.
And then there was the whole part of it that led me to say things like, “Great, after three years on the dance team you graduate with the skills to be an entry level topless dancer,” and “Fine, what am I going to get you for graduation, a pole?”
But I support my children and encourage them (sometimes through gritted teeth) in what they do, short of getting pregnant, becoming addicted to drugs or rooting for a National League baseball team (I failed in that regard, as well, with RR, but at least she is a baseball fan). So her mother and I shelled out a lot of money for outfits and shoes and travel (this is not an activity that is financially supported by the school district to the extent that, say, football, is). And we spent a lot of time sitting in high school gymnasiums watching her dance for fifteen minutes or so during a day in which we spent a lot more time doing nothing and watching a lot of other people’s children dance.
First, I became disabused of the notion that this was some kind of rally squad, cheer leader thing about which I, for reasons of my own, dating to my own adolescent fixations the scars that resulted from them, find so discomforting. This is dance. And it is not half time entertainment at the basketball game. It’s a “sport” (in high school parlance) all its own, with competitions between schools and a state championship and the whole junk trip. (See? I still ... never mind).
Watching this last year involved a combination of pain and pleasure, for me. As a dancer she was clearly behind most of the rest of the team and during parts of the routines her role was to stand or kneel to one side and watch the others dance (there were one or two others who also were relegated to this role during the more complicated and difficult parts of the team’s performance). It made me sad to see her, kneeling to one side, in front of a gymnasium full of adults and her peers, all of whom knew that she was not good enough to be included, at times. It made me wince, sometimes, to see her out of sync with the others, when she was included in the performance (and she was not the only one, by the way, on her team or other teams). It’s the kind of thing that makes a parent’s heart cry.
But it did not bother her. At least it did not bother her enough for her to complain about it or quit. She was on the team and glad to be there. She liked to dance in a way that I like to play the piano. No, not fair. She’s a lot better dancer than I am a piano player. But the point is that one need not excel in order to be gratified, in some way, by doing something.
But she got better. And her team--which was once a perennial contender but which had fallen on hard times--made progress in rebuilding its program. She was recognized as “Most Improved” at the end of the season.
It was a great moment for me to say how much I appreciated what she had accomplished, that I was wrong in how I approached this, and how glad I was that she put up with my arguing against it and was not dissuaded. (OK, maybe here is a piece of me that wishes she had stuck with acting, instead).
And she is back at it this year.
So, there we were, last Monday, in the grandstand in Lincoln High School’s gymnasium. And that’s when I thought, in line with the September 3 Discipline, that this is my last season to watch her dance. I will be around next year to see her do the daily doubles and buy the new shoes and go through aches and strained muscles of gearing up for the new season, but I will not be around for the Fall Festival, let alone for State, in the Spring. And I realized that I will miss her entire senior year of high school, not just the dance part.
That is the kind of thing that the September 3 Discipline keeps bringing to my consciousness.
Examples:
We are gearing up the legislative session at work. It’s something I’ve gone through every other October-November-December since 1991. I am known, atthe capitol. I have a reputation. I am an expert on juvenile delinquency and on child abuse and neglect law. They ask me when they want to know, over there. This is the last go around. In five years no one there will remember me, let alone wonder what I would have thought about this or that change in the law.
I have been watching the baseball play offs and the world series (and struggling more successfully with missing some games because of Quaker and other commitments). Well, it’s the last time around. I’ll never see another Yankee championship. I’ll die, next year, according to the Discipline, before the season is over and the play offs begin.
This goes on and on, every time I turn around I find myself engaged in some activity that is part of a grand or a mundane cycle of some kind (I went to the dentist, for example), a cyclic event that I am reminded, by the Discipline, will never recur, or that will only recur so many times.
But it’s OK. It’s OK that I won’t be doing my piece toward improving child abuse and neglect law, anymore. It’s OK that I will never get to be a real, full time judge. It’s OK that somewhere along the line I am going to stop knowing the outcome of baseball seasons (Some people will say that baseball imitates life. That’s not so. Life, at its very best, merely imitates baseball).
It’s the same with not seeing Rachel’s senior year of dance.
It’s important to be a part of what’s going on, yes, because we are all a part of one another’s lives. But the pieces of everyone’s lives come together and go apart. It’s the being there, not the staying there.
This has been changing me in all the ways that Stephen Levine’s book said that it would. This constant reminder has not had the effect of motivating me to do things in the sense of “I have to see the Grand Canyon before I die,” or “I have to clean out the closets so as to not leave a mess for the children.”
it has, rather, turned me further toward my relationships with others, even people long dead or moved so far away (by distance or other factors) that I will never see them again. It has especially been good for me because since I began this Discipline I have found that two more of my friends may well have an actual terminal diagnosis coming at the end of a series of tests they are undergoing.
And it keeps reminding me that we are all falling, we are each just a different distance from the ground. Though conscious of the fall, we must reach for the strawberries we pass, the ones we see growing out of the cliff. Mostly, in my life, I have denied that I was falling and the strawberries I managed to grasp were not so sweet. The strawberries were, in fact, a way to get my mind off of the fact of the inevitable consequence of the fall.
It was not so very long ago that I finally gave up on prayer as a means of trying to magically change the flow of events to something more pleasing to me. This is true even though it was years ago that I first starting saying that prayer is not the coin one inserts in the cosmic vending machine so as to have one’s fondest dream delivered at the pull of a lever, the push of a button.
I was drawn to tears, a year and a half or so ago, when I heard a young woman I have known and loved for twelve years or so, now, talk about how, when she was twelve, her mother was dying. She said that she laid in bed at night and prayed for her mother’s recovery. She made all kinds of promises to God about what she would do in return for saving her mother’s life (which reminded me how we often construct God in our own image--as though It, like us, can be bargained with). She said that she made every promise she could think of and it still didn’t work. It caused her to carry a chip on her shoulder for a long time, a chip that only recently, by the working of the Spirit in her heart, she has been able to lay down.
Hearing her tell this story was a part of what brought me to realize that when we pray for some kind of magical change in the condition of a loved one who is terminally ill we are actually engaging in a form of denial that disables our ability to cope with the here and now needs of that person (and of ourselves). If we pray, rather, for God’s will and for our own ability to cope with the situation in a fitting way--a way that is of service to that person and to the rest of us who surround that person--then we will not, in our own self centered anguish and pain, both for the person’s suffering and the implications of that suffering on us (both now and in the knowledge that such may well await us), avoid reminders of the truth we are denying. These reminders are actually the Spirit calling us to service, calling us to be there and not off in our fantasies of the way we think things ought to be.
This is not much, I know, to bring out of all this. But its’ what I am holding at the moment. It’s what I can bring to the party, today.
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
