A NEW ATTITUDE

A NEW ATTITUDE

I had thought for quite a while now that there is nothing new in the area of feelings and attitudes, now I am not so sure that what I knew to be true is so. Here is what has happened so far:

Until about two weeks ago it looked as if I could expect to live another three or four years; this is from the statistics for people who have what I have, and is a number not too far from the average expectancy for all men in this country. I am well aware that these statistics imply and I intend to do anything that I can to come out on the far side of that bell-curve; I also found the study that found people with heart failure often over estimate how long they have to go. I had asked a few medical people, found more than a few articles online that all said about the same thing. My chore had been to get my head around that notion, to accept what was and then to get on with my life.

As I wrote a week or so ago I had an appointment with someone who discovered that I have severe apnea, but that with treatment I can expect to add perhaps four years to this cruise that I am on. And one other thing, he now has probable cause for something that I had been told many times was idiopathic. Treatable and redeeming–quantity and quality.

In effect I have just have just been offered a doubling of my expectancy; this idea is taking a while to root in my cranium and germinate, but it will. There are events and situations all through life that cause feelings and attitudes; except that this business is different, what I am feeling and how I am seeing the world is not quite like any I have ever experienced. I am not ready to say that this is unique, it might just be a variation on one or more, I just can’t say yet.

Obviously I am happy with the news, I have long ago discarded any wish to be dead notions; have reached the conclusion that whatever pains and discomfort come along, no matter how intense, they cannot overwhelm that of being, of becoming. This new thing is a testimony to perseverance, to scratching at the tunnel face until the gold vein is completely discovered; and for that I am relieved, perhaps more than a bit smug. This that I have just received is a gift, more to God than from; but it is such an overwhelming gift that no words are appropriate. Perhaps it would be as if someone gave me a new car–then I see that it is a brand-new Rolls convertible; what the hell do you do with such a thing! A great problem to work at as I go on.

I may write more about this as I figure it out and believe it would be of interest to someone, anyone else. Let me add one more thing: To say that this is more a gift to God than from God is because I know that without man God is irrelevant; He is what we are about, that makes us what we are.

A Short Follow-up

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February 11, 2009

This is the third day of my ‘five minute a day writing exercise’ which I hope will graduate into something more, different, better. The first challenge is the subject and if the right one is found everything follows well from there. The post of yesterday could be thought of as heavy and even morbid, that is not an unknown criticism. Heavy? Yes, the topic of what goes on in the very center of a soul can’t be anything but heavy, except when it is frivolous; morbid? I don’t think so because it was a fine lines describing the utmost in living, in being. Remember that shying away from something means that I never get to know and enjoy it. For reasons that aren’t all that clear I do enjoy untangling the knots that are at the edge of my reason, my emotions, my spirituality.

I am going to leave this here.

Procrastination

I procrastinated writing today because I was trying to figure out what to say about something that was obvious and common: there is nothing to add to the description of what greed does to a person. Last night I drove someone whose being has been twisted because of greed, someone that we have been driving for a while, someone who I observe although he has no recollection of me. No one of any note, nor difference from many others. Three days ago I was sitting with Bert, sitting in the hallway of the convalescent home, sitting there without agenda. It was the contrast of these two situations that I thought I would write about, and now understand that there is nothing about greed that hasn’t been writ for millenia; and that greed is a boring subject.

What can be describe is this business of sitting with someone who is dying, who knows that I am with a hospice group, has agreed to have hospice assistance, who is doing what dying people do naturally.

Maybe absence of agenda is the core, no chore or topic that requires attention, maybe it is that absence that is special about this experience. I am not there with promise or requirement, there is no possibility of returning health, there are no battles to be fought, no love to win or lose, no need for obfuscation. It is being in its pure form: I think that the reason I do this is so that I can have this experience, know this rare feeling, share it with my good friend who doesn’t remember my name.

I realize that I could make a list of the greedy guy’s stuff, his airplane, ground vehicles, horses, hobbies, ownerships, estates, the pain he has caused to those close, to those who barely touch his sphere. I couldn’t make a list for Bert, I know of nothing, care not about any of it, there is no list nor agenda: there is just being in its pure form.

I don’t know if any of this is relevant to anyone else’s life, it isn’t the kind of experience I encounter with others, as I am out and about; I write it so that I understand better, and will use that understanding as I go on my way towards that end. That is the way I see it this morning.

There is nothing to write about the bird feeder, other than it is gone, an objection by the landlord, so it is now gone. The birds were fun while they were around, sadness that they are gone, and there will always be other things to fill their absence.

What’s new

The desire to write, to put words down for others to see, this act of arrogance; is that someone might want to spend time and effort in reading some more ordinary words of mine. There is no new story, there hasn’t been a new story, a different observation, a new thing for a long, long time; there are only the old themes and passions re bottled and new labels applied.

And yet I sit here with a fresh pot of coffee, I am putting down words, never a new word, never a new emotion, there hasn’t been a new story for thousands of years; and yet I sit here with a fresh pot of coffee and the need to write.

Leo Tolstoy never came up with anything that hadn’t been said previously; he wrote of family matters, love affairs, politics and war. And we love it that he did.

I am hung up on this idea of the new, a blind belief that newness is the same as life; but it isn’t, life is just life, it is being now, and making sure that there will be life after me.

The brown sparrows are at the feeder, they may be the same as were there yesterday, will be there again tomorrow, and the occasional cardinal. I don’t fill the feeder in hopes that an eagle or an ostrich will come to feed, I put seed there so that there will continue to be life outside my window.

I have written a few posts about how to cook, no detailed recipes, just how something is to be made into food the best way that I know. A good meal isn’t about new recipes, different ingredients, it is about enjoying what you are eating, what is in your mouth, the satisfaction of food well prepared, and food is the fuel for this body. Tomorrow we will all be hungry again, somebody will have to cook again. I might write a few more items all about how to make food again.

The sparrows eat, they warm themselves when there is a break in the clouds, they take advantage of eating a bit of snow for the water.

I ought to visit Bert in the home today, it has been over a week since I was there; it is not that I have signed a contract, am not receiving money, haven’t made a promise to his relatives, nor that he remembers me; visiting Bert is like putting out seed, cooking dinner, doing the laundry, taking a shower; none of it means anything in the long run, but it is necessary for today’s run.

My earlier mistake was to be buying into this notion that new is important, that there really might be something new, that the tiny novelties displayed for amusement are important; bullshit—there is being, and there is nothing, being is the important one.

That’s it for today, and tomorrow, just as it was yesterday.

The icebreaker

A few sparrows work on the last of the seed in the feeder, to find what might be edible, blowing snow of the last few days has made the bottom inch or so wet, then frozen, then thawed, not much is fit food; I need to clean the bin thoroughly, then blast it with the hair drier to make sure that all moisture is gone before refilling and hanging in the apple tree.

Yesterday was a grueling one; the seventeen mile drive in from O’Hare took two hours; my passenger, a minor television celebrity, as beautiful as a china doll, with a clear, modulated voice continuously chattering on her mobile phone, as shallow as a sheet of People magazine; every comment was a worn one, a repertoire of two emotions, neither of which worth remembering And not a ‘thank-you’ at the end of the two hours; perhaps we were both grateful that the trip was over. Sartre said that hell is other people, occasionally he was correct.

My next passenger is a heart surgeon with whom I had the conversation that we have had for each of the last seven years; he asks my opinion on a particular liberal, then he goes on for twenty minutes how this person is the devil in present form……….

That’s the end of my bitching, I needed to get that off my chest, needed to bitch, to vent.

The reason for my bitching is that I am in pain, on the subjective scale from 0 to 10 I am at 7 approaching 8. The medicine that I use to stop the pain ain’t working today, and there you are.

I remember a documentary film about an icebreaker, one of those powerful, sturdy, vessels that drive through the north, making way for others, bringing supplies to a few.

Arctic seas go on and on, without definition greater than that chunk straight ahead; there is ice, and there is more ice, occasionally a lacuna appears before the bow, the ship sprints through it, and then there is more ice.

When an icebreaker encounters ice that is too thick to be broken and shoved aside by the bow, it rams directly onto it, forces its thick steel belly up on the ice, letting its weight breaking through. The ship breaks by being heavy, by being forceful, by being persistent, and by using whatever of these several methods is appropriate.

It is a noisy business breaking through arctic ice; it is cracked by the prow, it grinds the entire length of the waterline, hour after hour, day after day. Behind is the path of fractured pans, of black water filling the gaps; further back, perhaps as long as an hour the ice has frozen, the seam is fused; there would be signs that one could discern, but there is no continuous passage, nothing permanent coming from all that banging and crashing, all the expenditure of thousands of horsepower. An Inuit would be able to show you how the ship had gone, an aerial observer would notice the linear pattern in the white mass; but there is no permanently open route.

The icebreaker bursts another yard, another mile, another day; and will do so tomorrow; going towards a position on a chart, following an internal gyro course; when I watched the movie I saw that the port is no different than any other, the direction temporarily relevant, important perhaps to someone but not for long, what is important is that the ship keeps going, doesn’t stop and so be locked in place for the winter. Icebreakers are powerful and sturdy, and they keep moving .

I have squeezed two large navel oranges for juice this morning, two glasses of juice, with all of the pulp, the kind of juice that requires some chewing to get down.

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The coffee and juice are finished, the pain medicine taken in full, the feeder is clean, dry and filled, this post is done; it is time to rest from the fatigue made by the pain of being today.

Walking the empty street

In my dream this morning I was walking down a city street, much like Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, there were stores and there were vacancies, the stores had replaced previous ones, had nailed their facades over the previous facades; there are gaps between the sheets of glossy black panels and the old, worn bricks to which the panels were fastened, strips of glossy metal laid meaninglessly over black sheets and around expanses of glass. I go into store after store, , the stores have random assortments of goods; there is a stuffed armchair with chromed strips around and down to the floor, the butter colored leather is overstuffed with feathers or foam, it is partially covered in the plastic the manufacturer used for shipping, there is nothing worth buying–I can think of no place I would put such a chair, no way I would sit in such a chair, no reason to show interest or to buy.

Another store, another group of things for sale, gadgets, doodads, accessories; a saleswoman approaches, she is hair color ‘blond #3′, lips ‘injection mk.4′, other paints and glued on bits, she says ‘you can fuck me if you wish’, I thank her and walk on.

The aisle I am walking comes to an end, there is another parallel to it, and to cross from where I am to the parallel one requires that I use a moving walkway four feet long, I step on because that is the only way, the next aisle continues past stacks of stuff; why was one aisle now the other one, what is the difference, why is there a moving walkway four feet long?

I walk through one store and then another, down the street past places with signs ‘for rent’, ‘for sale’, ‘will modify to suit tenant’. Why? For what reason are any of these stores open? Why would I want to fuck a woman who has no features of her own, who is shaven and waxed and plucked and sprayed? Wouldn’t it be nice to hold someone’s hand, return a quiet smile, walk together? Wouldn’t that be nice? And isn’t that the fantasy that is most difficult to reject?

This is the dream I had early this morning, I lay in bed for nearly an hour looking at my dream, memorizing the parts that are important; then I got up to start walking my day, I squeezed the juice from two large navel oranges, left the filter off of the juice machine so that all the pulp would come through with the juice. Today I want to chew and swallow, taste and smell, extract all that a couple of good oranges have within them. Five scoops of beans go into the grinder, warm the coffee pot and the mug with boiling water from the kettle; coffee and very hot water stirred together, the grains swelling , the brew is deepest brown and opaque; it tastes as good as it smells as good as I imagined before throwing the covers off and getting up.

The dream? That this is a meaningless journey; things, places and people that I look to for comfort, for permanence are neither.

What is permanent is the walk, be satisfied putting one foot in front of the other, doing it again, breathing one breath after another, going from one shop to another, cease looking to make an accessory become a permanent piece of who I am.

Mary Tyler Moore did a commentary for a show about television comedy; the person on camera was injected, tightened, spray painted, tufted with unnatural fibers, lashes glued and tinted. A grotesque sight. Why do this? Why appear like this? Is that all there is to that person? Is she nothing but facade? And through the interview I remembered how she and others in her apartment building objected to falcons nesting, spoiling the facade of their building. Is it all just fucking facade for her? Is there a her under all that facade?

My dream was not about despair, emptiness and meaninglessness, it is about the walk; it is about how difficult it is to turn away from what is offered out there, that what is offered isn’t important or interesting. There is the walk. And it is done alone, no matter how much I wish it were otherwise, it is done alone. I don’t understand just why, but there is real joy in doing the walk.

Nothing big today

I ordinarily write this thing early in the morning, but there was nothing special today.

I bought a new bird feeder, am waiting for the birds to recognize it.

I knew what was in the newspaper, learned everything the  night before.

Had said everything I know to say so far about the spiritual experience.

Have the date for my annual colonoscopy, next Tuesday.

The combination of these things has stopped me in my tracks, there can’t be anything new to an existentialist until everything catches up. Let me try to phrase this another way.

There are all sorts of things going on in one’s life, from the most mundane first piss in the morning to that of letting the mind approach what is divine; in between are the housekeeping chores that need doing regularly, earning money to pay for ‘putting beans on the table’, having fun in order to ease the tensions; and then there is the upcoming periscope exploration of my gut, something that was just an annual event, until it became something different. Two years ago they found that the expectedly benign polyps were not, that the one in a thousand chance became one in one; and the next year they found the same, the polyps were cancerous, an aggressive cancer. Each time the area was cleared and declared safe for the processing of shit, but it has changed my expectations.

Now is a time to test how well my mindfulness exercises work, how secure I am in whatever spiritual knowledge I have gained, to add another thread of connection to Bert who is dying of colon cancer that has metastasized. It was at 4 a. m. this morning that all came together to scare me.

A couple of days ago I wrote that I was sad, today I am scared.  It isn’t easy to put the word ’scared’ down here and then prepare to push the ‘Publish’ button, it just isn’t done.  The major part of being an existentialist-guy is to fully experience every aspect of what is, to exhaust the sap of each moment, leave it dry so that the next can be tasted.  Just as the sadness came and went so will this fear go, not for about a week or more, but it will pass through, it will pass through completely because I won’t cause any of it to stick behind due to denial.  This whole business has a wonderful analogy when I watch the video screen of the colonoscopy procedure, do it completely and then go on to whatever is next.

My gastroenterologist  likes to tell me that there are more nerve endings in the gut than in the spinal column, that there is a great system that keeps everything moving through, and doing it completely and continually; I think that he must be writing a paper on the subject.

On another note I know the date of the next meeting for bereaving children and widowed; this will be the third time I attend, what my role will be, can be, for these people these situations isn’t yet defined, there will be something that I can bring to the party, something about having been through the process, something about not having support or guidance and so knowing the value of it for others–for the time being I am just present and waiting.

Being present and waiting is a good way to be.

Slicing through the now

Yesterday I received two different comments that disturbed me. They disturbed me in that good way, put me just somewhat askew, and I thank both of my correspondent friends for sending them to me, they were just what I needed. I have spent much of the last day trying to nudge my gyroscope back on course. The first comment was in reaction to a shot I’d made about the U/Us, that she felt ‘at home with this bunch of seekers’. The second comment had to do with the birds at the feeder experiencing the joy of being in the present to an extent that man cannot. (I hope that I have transferred both ideas in the correct spirit.)

In 1960 I went to Europe on an ocean liner, the Q. S. S. Arkadia, quadruple screws was the reason for the Q. S. S.; this was still the standard method of going overseas, we were 7 days Montreal to Bremerhaven, with a couple of intermediate stops.

I liked to go to the bow and look down to where the prow cut the water, fascinated by looking slightly ahead at the smooth surface that will be cut and disturbed by this monster shoving through. Tens of thousands of horsepower drove us at 25 knots through cold dark water; the North Atlantic Ocean in October is cold, the water under our keel several miles thick; the contrast of this great ship as just a speck; the little curl of the bow wave and the wake changing nothing of the 2,000 fathoms.

Perhaps a foot or two in advance of the prow a small hill of water formed from the standing pressure wave of our progress, in a way this bump was as looking into the future, the present was where the steel split the ocean, the mound was just prior to that. Looking into the future is impossible but here it was happening, and it was irrelevant, by the time the hill of water was recognized it was under us, gone under foot. Seeing that short distance meant nothing, and once it passed under us it meant nothing. One couldn’t contemplate that patch of water rising to meet us, it would be gone by then.

The only thing that mattered was our moving through. The present is only important because it is now become the past. It is the becoming that is important to our being. One can focus on the wake of the ship, as would a conservative; one could look a mile ahead, as foolishly optimistic as Mr. Micawber; but it is where that hull disturbed the surface of the great ocean that one knows excitement.

To say that the birds feel joy is to misunderstand what joy is, it is because the present passes us and we know it, that is what makes us special, we know that what is is now gone, and that there is more coming. We know grief, despair, surprise, we feel joy in all of it.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense, it did for an hour or so at 5 a. m.

I am not sure that I feel less disturbed than I did, but I sure feel alive, feel the joy of sailing the deeper ocean.

I find nothing enlightening in organized religion: Some guys sitting around a table, deciding a program, that doesn’t enlighten in any way. The only thing holy about that scene is the word hot-stamped on the cover of a book. What I get from the business of Jesus, Judas and the Romans is that Jesus intuitively knew that to transcend what came before he had to feel the depth of scorn and rejection, feel the impersonal indignity of torture, feel the despair of certain and prolonged dying. Jesus had to feel the knowledge that God was not about relieving that pain, it was then that he could and did leave port on a new course. His boat then sailed a different sea. It is now our opportunity and obligation to gain a grain of wisdom from that unique example.

Being in the present

That first smell of coffee as I opened the grinder lid, as the hot water roiled the grounds, as I lift the cup to my mouth for that first sip.

Preceding that I had an orange, I could have made fresh juice in the machine, but not for this morning, today I quartered the sphere so that I could bite with the full width of my mouth. Feel the threads that hold the cells together, feel the juice as the cells burst open, smell the fresh orange on my beard; the first flavor of this morning.

All of that was for a purpose, was planned. At about 3 a. m. I awoke to the presence of memories culled from nearly 70 Christmas mornings, the very good ones demanded that I relive them, open those old presents once again, the disappointing ones wanted recognition as well, to show the power of not quite meeting expectations; and on and on the memories came with swells of intensity, waves of yesterdays.

I realized that this Scrooge episode must end, there ain’t no profit to mood or anything else by bringing in the past this morning; Christmas morning is the quietest morning of the year in a huge city, there is almost nothing going on, even the MacDonald’s is closed today, no one is up and about. And so it is an opportunity for memories to fill the absence of real activities, would fill this Christmas morning with scenes that cannot and should not be repeated.

And so I purposely cut the orange in a way that would fill my mouth.

I purposely stood over the coffee press as the hot water swirled and released the strong odor of Peet’s Garuda Blend, one of their strongest.

What is is right-now. Inhale all the flavor that right-now has to offer, recognize that the birds have come into the yard and are chirping in the sunlight. This is what this Christmas is.

It was a difficult couple of hours, the pull of great gifts, of family together, of laughter, the attraction of those memories is strong, and has been known to lead me down the path of the morose and the bitter.  I do feel the pain of not knowing the grandchildren who open presents I have sent them, feel the pain of a parent who has an unhappy child; I feel that pain because it is real and it is part of this morning.  But it is merely pain, not the mortal wound.

I looked forward to writing this as I lay awake just an hour ago. I look forward to going to work today (they called last night to see if I could do an ‘as directed’ order).

What I am in the process of learning from these 69 Christmases is to devour each one in its time, and then taste what comes next; not the natural way of a long-standing depressive personality, it takes effort and repetition to break the old ways, and I recognize my success.

I just interrupted my prattling here for a couple of minutes in order to fill the feeder, if I am going to find joy in a flock of sparrows I better not forget to do what is necessary to have them and their exuberance.

Again, I want to say that it is now that has the real nutrition for the soul, it always has been that way.  It is why I do hospice volunteering, sit and talk with someone who is not long here, but who has today.

The weather today is to be mostly sunny, with a high near 40.  I am to take some people of means to a number of places this afternoon.  Then it will be home for my recent tradition, cook a frozen pizza and drink an extra glass of wine.

The sparrows have just recognized that the feeder has been filled.

Random people in my life

I wrote this the other day, for some reason didn’t post it.——-

As I was finishing my coffee, finishing the morning paper, listening to hurried chatter of sparrows in the bushes, the outside day is gray, and another shade of gray, and another, contrasted with the color of old, heavy, wet snow; what is my day going to be about?

I wonder if I’ll read a posting by the wife of an Alzheimer afflicted husband, an electronic nudge from the guy who walks a spiritual path similar to my own, I remember the incident of a passenger who earlier in the day had ordered up his Bentley, the porters brought the wrong car, they brought up his wife’s Bentley; these threads of memory and anticipation are present for a while, disappear, reappear, my mind doesn’t settle on any one, the Auden poem pinned to the wall above my monitor. What am I about today?

There was the comment on something I had written several days before: the writer seemed to be angry with the present state of human development, wondered if we ought to go backward; this in response to my asking the question whether we are human without language?