The Busy Bee Has No Time For Sorrow

Isn't it interesting that we tend to think of time almost as a raw material, a resource, a fuel? We say we "spend" time. We speak of using it up. We even accuse ourselves of wasting it. This all seems to make sense. And yet...

What if it's more like a matrix or a space in which to store things? A treasure box to fill with treasure? A honeycomb in which we store the honey of memories and good deeds?

What difference would it make for us, if we adopted this metaphor of time as honeycomb? Well, maybe a big one.

I remember, back when my son was still really young, say three and four and five--dealing with this question of time a lot. Taking him to the playground. Listening to him talk and talk and talk. Dressing him. Feeding him. Bathing him. Washing and folding his clothes. Reading to him. Taking him for walks in the woods, his little hand in mine, his other one holding a leaf. All this took time, and a great deal of time. But what's more important than taking care of your little boy, who needs and loves you? What sweeter honey to fill the honey-comb of your life could there ever, ever be?

It's a hard thing to get away from thinking we have to measure time out oh-so-carefully. Buy as much life-activity with every second as possible. Hoard it. Keep it close. But it's worth adjusting our point of view. 

After all, when the honey comb is finally full, and the ultimate harvest has come, how do we want to be remembered? Surely we want people to say something like: "What a sweet life he lived, so full of affection and love; he never thought twice about helping." Or, "She always had time for me; in her presence I always felt like a gift."


HB

Hospitality: Travel in Disguise?

Hospitality is a subtle form of travel. It offers many of the best gifts of travel, without imposing the many costs that literal travel imposes on the living globe. And here are some of the gifts I mean; xhen a guest comes you get:

• The sudden immersion in variety.
• An uptick in the probability of surprise.
• Access to a set of stories not your own.
• Exposure to angles of perception not your own.
• A good excuse for eating and drinking.
• An opportunity, by means of comparison and contrast, to recognize the blessings in your life. 

All these are gifts of travel. They are also gifts incidental to the practice of hospitality. 

Now of course, there are limits to every metaphor and comparison, and limits certainly apply here. But so what? What matters is that when people get together as guest and host, something very powerful often happens. Something full of the opportunity for growth and change. Something again, quite a bit like the best kind of travel. 

Not so long ago, my wife and I hosted a family of five, the youngest of whom was a boy of four. Throughout their visit, the boy kept calling me into the sun-room, which serves as a writing and study space and is also full of plants. He asked me to show him my typewriter, and to explain to him my hourglass. Then it was on to my bamboo flutes. Would I, he asked, teach him to make a sound on these? I did my best. At one point he even inquired as to whether I kept any "disguises" in the room, a question to which, sadly perhaps, I could only answer no. What did he have in mind, though, I wondered: a superhero costume, a pirate get-up?

Then absolutely out of the blue, he said: "You are an awesome writer!" Nothing rational here. Just the purest of unsought gifts. A compliment given in absolute faith. And I'll take it. When a four-year-old child says you're awesome at something, why not just believe? 

All in all, it was a delightful evening with both the family and the boy. And here's a question: if, in lieu of this memorable evening with this inquisitive and charming little human being, I had been offered a fine meal at a restaurant on the Riviera, or an evening under the stars in the Australian desert, or an adventurous afternoon with camel traders in the Sahara, dancers included, would I have traded it in? 

I think not. The boy, I think, was travel enough. His curious spirit was like a beautiful place I had stumbled upon, and our evening's friendship was my visit to his mind. 



HB

When Wisdom Belongs to the Young

I'm biking to the grocery these days, having learned a route that's both pleasant and safe to ride. Really I'm delighted with it. It runs along a wide and surprisingly lightly traveled residential street, lined with beautiful trees, which pass by in a tall luscious green blur; and past the water tower, which I'm fond of just because I like to think about all that water sitting way up there like a brain that thinks only about water; and past a playground where on a summer's day there are always kids enjoying themselves, running around, climbing, tagging each other, and sliding--otters at heart, I call them, when they're sliding on their slides. There's no exertion to speak of on these grocery trips; the road is all smooth and level. Oh there are a few odd twists and turns, and once in awhile for the sake of safety the route runs in a direction antithetical to the crow's flight; but hey after something like ten calm minutes of pedaling you're there at the Town and Country, ready to buy your comestibles and load up the bike-baskets with them. Sweet and sour. Fruit and milk. Time to get back to Sunnyside.

Why am I so happy to have found the route? Well first of all, I just like to ride my bike. It's painted twilight blue, and it just feels good to ride it--to feel the wind and sun, and to move with that beautiful balanced effortlessness that's the elemental enjoyment of cycling. On a bike, you can feel as balanced and coordinated as a gymnast, without having to be a gymnast. You can feel as weightless and wind-addicted as a bird, without having to be a bird. Then of course there are the political and environmental advantages: the kick you can get out of minor rebellion against the petro-surveillance state, of leaving the car in the garage and yet accomplishing your errands with some semblance of efficiency. 

But now I have a confession to make: I didn't find the route on my own. I wasn't even looking for it anymore. My son Soren has the household patent on it, because he used to ride a route similar to it to school and realized that, with a little alteration, it could serve as a route to our grocery too. He noted it all down on a piece of scrap paper for my wife, and she introduced me to the scrap paper, and she and I took our bikes out and followed the directions together, translating them from lines and words on the paper into real movement on the streets of the city. Only then--only after all that--would I believe. Yes there is a route. It's safe. It's pleasant. It's even almost ideal.

Why hadn't I found that route myself? Well for one reason really, and one reason only: I hadn't tried very hard. I mean, I had, once or twice, tried some of the routes that looked most logical on the map. But these just hadn't worked out very well. Either the streets were too narrow. Or the traffic too heavy. Or a motorist hooted at me. Et cetera. And so, having at first not succeeded, had I tried, tried, and tried again? No not at all. No, rather than looking a little harder, rather than seeking out the "crooked ways" that the poet William Blake insisted "are the ways of genius," I had taken my cue from the lazy-bones carbon-saturated culture around me. I had given up on the bike altogether and just taken the car instead. After all, I told myself, it's not so very far, right? After all, what difference could a couple of miles of driving make? After all, after all...

It's sad how easily we give up, and how often. Sad how many possibilities for richness and activity in our lives can bloom in potential only, simply because we're not sticktuitive enough to pluck them into reality. Sad how permanently we get discouraged, and insist discouragement is justified. And live that way. Conventionally.

Enter the young, who--not always, but with some regularity at least--prove themselves to be an able antidote to our discouragement. Maybe younger minds are a bit more flexible, able to perceive possibilities just a little left or right of what's right there in front of them. Or maybe they're willing to try a little longer. Or maybe some of them--my son for instance--just seem to keep their optimism and equanimity with them wherever they go--like a handy Swiss army knife. This blade can love to bike. This blade can draw a map. This blade for sure can find a way to the grocery. 

"Here Dad, here's my nomination for a route. You can try out mine."

HB

On Self-Improvement

The longer I live, the less zeal I find I can scrounge up for the project of improving myself. Maybe I've tried too many times and fallen short of the goal (who likes to fail?). Maybe self-improvement is for the young, a club in which I no longer qualify as a member. Maybe too though, there are good reasons not to pursue that will-o'-wisp.

Now, one thing I can promise: I'm not claiming to be beyond improvement! Here, in fact, is a brief list of my faults, as I view them. I'll leave it as a bullet list, since numbers in this context would depress me.

• cynicism 
• dilettante-ism
• a habit of dangling my participles 
• a tendency, when in the midst of a project, to forget, even with my wife, how to converse or even note that others are present in the home.
• a general lack of willpower to follow through on my ambitions.
• a habit of failing to thank people adequately.
• et cetera....

Sigh. 

So, again, I don't deny room for improvement. I'm not even claiming improvement is impossible. I'm not even claiming I haven't, at least in some areas of my life, improved. No, I'm saying this: 

To improve the self is not enough. As a goal it's too shallow. It ends at the mere edges of the skin. Why not choose instead just do the right thing for the world? Wouldn't that be better? Isn't that hard enough?

I'm not saying, "trade in your desire to perfect yourself for a desire to perfect the world." I'm not really talking about end-goals at all, and I'm certainly not talking about perfection. I'm talking about doing the right thing in the moment, and day by day, to answer to the needs of those around you and of the place around you. I'm saying maybe this is the best any of us can do, and maybe more than enough to expect of ourselves, given the not-so-terrific state of the world and our relative powerlessness as normalizers.

You can get started right away. There are no prerequisites to doing the right thing. Oddly enough, too, once we've placed ourselves in the forum of useful action, many of the goals that improvers of the self seem to fixate on, prove to be beside the point. 

To do the right thing, you don't have to have traveled widely.
To do the right thing, you don't have to be organized.
To do the right thing, you don't need to be the perfect body weight.
To do the right thing, you don't have to be learned and informed.
To do the right thing, you don't even have to be a pleasant person to be around.

Conversely:

You might be a cultured person, accomplished and graceful in society, and still be leading an extremely selfish life.

You might have trained your memory and mind to do all sorts of amazing feats, and still on balance be giving very little to the world. 

You may have developed a willpower so muscular as to accomplish almost anything; you may have choreographed your daily schedule like a gold-medal-winning synchronized swim; you may have authored six and a half self-help books, and still be doing the wrong thing for the world. Still be a burden to the present and a curse to the future.

Skills are not the same thing as virtuous action, nor are smooth habits of social interaction going to guarantee it. Knowledge of self does not necessarily lead to virtue either; sometimes the two don't even seem correlated.

There was a time--a time so vivid in the memory that many still believe we haven't left it behind--when energy was cheap, and progress seemed limitless, and it was at least excusable to think that human beings could do whatever they wanted, and spend whatever resources they wanted to spend, in improving themselves according to their own definitions, and the world would prosper anyway. After all there would still be enough to go around, right? After all, whatever got wasted in the process could just be buried or burned, or simply forgotten, right?

But clearly the world in the past ten to twenty years has become a much more thorny, crowded, and limited place. Just listen to the news, and it becomes clear that every move we make nowadays as individuals and as communities has consequences for others. Therefore our choices have to be made with others in mind. With the living systems of the planet in mind. With the poor in mind. With the future in mind. With relationship in mind. With action in the improvement of all of these in mind. 

Given the situation then--given our predicament of surreal complexity--what's the right thing to do? 

My guess is that this is usually a ruse-question. A feint. A pretense. A pose. At least when it comes to doing the right thing by the earth, the answers are all right there before us. It's only a matter of following through. Of translating perception into action. We have to make do with less. We have to do more with our own hands at every level, and stop expecting machines and poor people in other places on the globe to do the work of sustaining us--as though we were babies too weak to do anything but recline in place and be spoon-fed. We have to stop trying to improve ourselves in all sorts of largely fictional ways, and instead get down to work improving the real situation of our homes and our communities: by means of zealous protection of what remains of our natural heritage. By means of actively loving where we live, and what we already have. By means of the strengthening of family and community relationships. By means of the local resurrection of once-universally practiced skills--gardening, food preservation, carpentry, baking, sewing, playing the piano to entertain the family...  

Heck, maybe raising our ability to do the right thing whatever the cost, ought to be the very definition of self-improvement, and nothing else. If so--if the increase of virtuous action ever becomes our definition of self-improvement--then I'm all for it. Until that happens though, count me out of the camp that pursues it. I consider it a distraction.

HB

Jr., A Parable

This week, a friend and neighbor of mine, who shares my passion for theater, lost his mother. The event brought to mind this parable, which I like to pair with Hamlet's words, spoken toward the end of his play, regarding the timing of his own imminent death: "Ripeness is all..."

Jr., 1999

The hospital's north side faced the parking ramp. In front of this ramp stood a utility pole. And beside the utility pole (chained to it, in fact) was the Post-Trib machine. The front door of the dispenser was of cracked plexiglass, more or less transparent to the headlines. Was today's newspaper worth a buy? Well the window was there, and the headlines were there, to help a reader such as Norman Jr. decide.

Now, his father, more than once, had told him that he actually watched out the window every afternoon--in order to catch sight of him, Norman Jr., ransoming the daily from the machine, and then coming up to read the paper to him in his hospital room.

Norman Jr. liked the idea, of his father watching and waiting for him to show up with the news. It was such the opposite of the way it had been way back when he was a kid. Back then it was his dad who was the arriving one,  and back then it was he, Norman Jr., who would jump up from his alphabet blocks or red wagon or the television, and scamper to the front door, in order to hug the stout trees of his father’s legs and gaze up into the mysterious green leaves of his father’s bearded face. Then he would beg to know what his dad had done that day and what it was like out there in his dad’s world. But now, these days see, it was just the other way around. Now it was he, Norman Jr., who by reading the news aloud, could give to his father the gift of the news of the world: the world beyond his hospital room. The world beyond the utility pole and the parking ramp. The world beyond.

Of course, there was something sad about the change. But it was right too. This was just the way things went: roles always reversing themselves. Responsibilities changing hands. The globe itself turning daily on its axis.

So there he was that day, standing in front of the newspaper machine and looking in through the window of the machine at the headlines, with maybe his dad looking on from above. And this was the headline:

Norman Breezes, Sr., Passes at 5:34

That was really the headline. How it got there nobody knows. But Norman looked at his wristwatch: five o’clock. Okay. Okay. There was still time. Just barely, but still time.

He would just go in as usual. Go in and up the stairs. He would nod to the nurse at the third floor desk. Enter the room where his father lay. Smile. Sit down beside the bed in the armchair there. And, just as he had been doing for some weeks now--just read him the news.

HB