Pyramids in the Sand

In one sense, our highest achievements are like sculpting pyramids in the sand. The waves of time and change will eventually obliterate all the creations of our hands. So what's the point? Why all the effort at achievement? Why all the arduous endeavors to learn from our failures and finally get it right?

I've come to believe that what we become and help others to be as a result of our worldly efforts are spiritual things that will never be erased. A good deed for a friend, an innovation at work that improves things in some way, a social media post that informs or heals or encourages, those few minutes on Zoom or Face Time with a good person who needs your help can have ripples of positive consequence that never end. Plus, why should we think in the first place that impermanence itself drains things of all value? Perhaps it endows good things with a particular, zestful, concentrated value, however ephemeral in itself though lasting for us, to be fully savored as we can, and celebrated as the art we’re here to make. So build boldly in the sand, hear the ocean, feel the breeze, notice the little birds, and enjoy.

My Own 80/20 Rule

Last night before falling asleep I had a fascinating thought.

I've never taught a good enough class. I've never given a good enough speech. I've never written a good enough essay. In fact, with one amazing exception, nothing I've ever done has risen to my own lofty expectations. The best efforts of my life so far have attained about 80% of the quality or excellence I had aimed for and worked toward, and have perhaps had at most about 20% of the positive impact I had imagined.

I've always done the best I knew how, with 100% commitment to the task and an enthusiasm and dedication that refuses to give up, regardless of the gaps in quality and impact that seem so stubbornly entrenched in my outcomes. I'm oddly proud of that form of 100%, rather than being simply disappointed about the rest.

The one exception to this rule seems to be the story that told itself to me over a five year period and insisted that I write it down and somehow get it out to the world. My only job was to look and listen and write. I had to quiet my mind and get out of the way and let the story unfold itself. I think that, with the second editions of the books that resulted, now out, I've hit about 98% of the quality I had aspired to attain in my transcription of the amazing tale. And so, I can be happy with about 2% of the positive impact I might have envisioned in the end, should the stories arise to that point in the world. This seems to be how it works.

But I may finally be at the stage in my life when I'm learning how to get out of my own way. The stories have begun to show me that, both in the way they came to me, and in their deep lessons. Fulfillment may depend on a sort of wonderful and all too rare spiritual emptiness that alone allows of an exuberant filling up that we ourselves could never have managed out of our best ego resources and energies. Perhaps when our personal presumptions get down to 0%, then our contribution can go to 100.

If you're curious about the stories, you can find out more at www.TheOasisWithin.com.

The Size of Your Life

I live in many ways a small, snug life. And I'm happy in it. But one of the hardest things in the modern world is to be content with the size of your life.

People contact me all the time to tell me about their grand plans, their world-historical ambitions and dreams that will likely play out on a stage so big that the earth itself will seem too small to support it all. And even our own galaxy, in contrast, may appear to be a bit modest and out of the way for the immense grandeur that is to transpire, if their goals are realized. 

This has been going on for decades. Really. My wife says I'm some sort of a magnet for grandiose dreamers. I don't know why. I do enjoy hearing of their ambitions. I deeply appreciate unfettered enthusiasm. I love thinking big. But as I listen to the various magnificent plans, I always wonder: "How?" And sometimes: "Why?"

Most days, I work at home. And most of my day involves working on very little things. I realized long ago that if I was going to personally change the world for the better, it would have to be very slowly. And so now, on the brink of my 63rd birthday, you've got to give me credit for sticking to my own plan and sense of timing. I've been slow, indeed. The world is not yet, it seems, quite changed in the way I've intended. Maybe I've planted a few seeds over the years that will germinate. And it could be that the results of those seeds will go far beyond anything I can currently imagine. But then again, if not, that's fine, too.

I've come to suspect that there is a way in which the smallest lives can be among the biggest, and what play out as the biggest may often be missing out on the real adventure. You see, surface appearances don't tend to be reliable guides to deeper realities. There may be a spiritual transvaluation of values that's always going on. Focus on the right things, and your life, however humble it seems, is in reality infinitely expansive. Chase the wrong things, however grand, and you've shrunk it down to a pinpoint of value. And then, in the realm of the right things, any little action can have ripples that don't stop. My hyperbolic dreamers, by contrast, often aspire to the role of demi-gods, and want to make huge waves that could end up with the effect of a tsunami.

So, my thought for the day, if I actually have one here, is to enjoy, relish, and value the small things in your life. Maybe you are changing the world, whether you're advertising it in huge letters of skywriting for us all to read or not. Maybe your small is really big.

Small is good.

A Royalty of the Spirit, Relevant to All

There are, among us, certain spiritual people who seem to be in touch with something more, something that lights them up and guides them and inspires them with love and compassion and wisdom, and even knowledge of an extraordinary sort. But it isn’t just a small group of spiritual adepts who have the ability to receive insight and guidance through meditative stillness and prayer, and an open heart of eager willingness. All of us represent a royalty of the spirit who have come into this exotically strange, terrible, and wonderful world with a birthright that we often don't acknowledge, understand, or assert. And yet, still, there are times when a man or a woman, or even, and perhaps more often, a boy or a girl, will be struck with a message from beyond the visible, tangible world of the senses, just out of the blue, and with no preparation or anticipation. It could be a word of encouragement, or direction, or even warning. When it occurs, it can seem to come from outside us, and yet at the same time, from deep within us.

This actually happens, I think, to all of us at some points in our earliest years, but we often later lose our memories of these experiences, because they’re not reinforced for us by the surrounding culture. We’re not encouraged to become all that we can be, in the full range of our capacities, or to do all that we can do. And so, some of our innate abilities, a crucial part of what I like to think of as our royal inheritance, will atrophy and grow weak over time. But they’ll never disappear. They can’t be utterly extinguished. That would mean the annihilation of the soul itself. And yet they can be hobbled and starved and buried under the debris of triviality and of those worldly pressures that we too often refer to as the practical demands of life – as if life has any demands greater and more practical than that we be the best of who we are. We too easily and commonly adapt ourselves to the lowest ways of the kingdom of this world, in patterns of activity and thought that are perhaps unproblematic in themselves, but only as long as they don’t eclipse what’s higher. And yet, we too often allow them to make us forget the royal palace of the spirit, and the aligned rights, duties, and priviledges that exist in connection with it, deep within us, even though it is they that most essentially define who we are.

Despite all this, those of us who do recognize and honor the realm of the spirit should never be too quick to divide the world between an elite group of higher functioning individuals, who seek to partake of everything within the spirit that’s available to us, and, on the other hand, the majority of humanity, who seem to live as self-imposed exiles from their own royalty, and act as if they are mere commoners of the spirit. There is, instead, a vast spectrum of openness and experience represented in the world. Truly spiritual, and remarkably advanced souls certainly exist, at one end of the sweep of human experience, with the most sadly dimmed and brutish personalities at the far end. An ordinary person, who’s never as ordinary as he or she might seem, to superficial and external appearances, is always capable of more depth and breadth than any casual acquaintance, colleague, or sometimes even a good friend, might expect.

There are depths behind depths, and layers beneath layers and, if we could only see all the people around us through eyes that know and remember this, the world would look so different to us, and more like it indeed most fundamentally is.

Exceptional People Around Us

I’ve been exercising my memory for the past 6 months by memorizing Shakespeare soliloquies, mainly the famous ones. It all started with a short passage from Hamlet. I remember the day I had just learned it – it wasn’t easy – and I still had to practice it all the time.

So. I was in line at the grocery store, a Fresh Market near my house, and the lady in front of me turned around and apologized for having so many items in her cart. I promise I wasn’t counting. I said, “No problem. Take your time. I’m rehearsing in my head a famous literary passage I just learned.”

The man who was ringing up her items stopped and looked at me with an expression of appreciation, almost of deep brotherhood, and said,

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote.

Well. That was unexpected at a grocery store checkout counter. But, it was the slow line. So, the clerk went on for a few more seconds of recitation and then stopped and looked at me with a big smile, and I just had to say,

And smale fowles maken melodye, That slepen al the night with open ye.

The guy looked really surprised and said, “You KNOW that?” I said, “Yeah, Chaucer, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Good job.” And a lady behind me gave me a look that “perced to the roote” because I think her ice cream was melting through all this.

Just two days later, I’m in a Harris Teeter, and the young lady checking out my groceries said something to me that I didn’t catch. I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you. I was practicing a passage from Hamlet in my head.”

She said, “Oh! Really? I memorized Hamlet once.”

I said, “You mean you memorized a passage from Hamlet?”

She said, “No, the whole thing.”

“The whole thing? The whole play?”

“Yeah,” she said, “But not in English.”

“What do you mean, not in English? It’s an English play.”

“Yeah, I know, but I memorized it in Klingon.”

“The Star Trek Language?”

“Yeah, it was more fun that way. But it took, like, four months.”

Well.

And then, last week, a different grocery store cashier spontaneously performed a Shakespeare Sonnet for me. I mean, it was Senior Discount Day at the store, so I think she took off a few lines. But it was most of Sonnet 116. In case you’re interested.

Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house. Strange things happen.

But I came away from these recent conversations with a new realization – and not just about where our English majors are getting jobs these days – the market for literature grads is surprisingly fresh.

My realization was, that we’re surrounded by exceptional people in the world. They’re all around us. And that’s easy to forget. But when we break through the background hum of habit, poke a hole in the ordinary, and really talk to people, and give them a chance, they can sometimes shine in unexpected ways. And then, we learn.

Break through that background hum today, in some way. Poke your own little hole in the ordinary, and see what you discover.