Back when I was in college (now some twenty five years ago) it was a running joke with my roommate how often I found myself frantically searching my side of the room for my keys, or how often I'd come running back into the room some five minutes after leaving for class, having realized I had left my keys behind. I accepted the jibes, at least after I found the truant keys, but to my memory, never once in all my four years as a student--never once!--did I sit down to consider just what such a habit of misplacement and forgetfulness might mean. About the unwarranted busyness of my hours. About the unquiet in my mind.
I mark it down as an improvement that these days I lose track of my keys only rarely. Nevertheless, it does happen; and when it does, I still find myself pretty dependably reluctant to draw any conclusions about the event beyond the moment. “General?” I say. “Say anything general about my life? No no, it was just a temporary lapse; just gravity acting at the wrong time, making me drop them. It was that stupid local advertising flyer okay? I laid it down over my key ring and fob, which made me accidentally lose sight of them!” And of course there's no need to fixate on literal keys alone. Missed appointments are lost keys. Fits of temper are lost keys. Tears of stress are lost keys.
There is a hermetic proverb that declares that the everyday realities of our daily life mirror and refer to a larger macrocosmic order. The proverb goes: “As above, so below.” And we might just as easily alter the proverb and say, “As in your outer life, so within.” “Look at your life,” we ought to say to ourselves more often. “Take its events into your heart for purposes of reflection and diagnosis." When stress rules our lives; when schedules are so crowded they feel like ferries about to capsize; when necessary objects such as keys go AWOL on a regular basis--what does all this suggest about our inner lives? A lack of the food for reflection perhaps? A disconnection from the sources of sanity? A poorly meditated set of values? A dearth of music, deeply heard, or of other forms of beauty?
Just the other day, I ran across a sixteenth century poem by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, called “The Means to attain Happy Life:” which I think might just as easily be called “The Keys to the Happy Life,” or even “The Lost Keys to the Happy Life.” It begins:
Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The richesse left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind....
I like it that the poem is addressed to someone called “Martial,” which of course, suggests someone used to fighting. Someone given to solving trouble with discipline, organization, order, and machines that multiply your strength. Is Martial the sort of person we're trying to be--as soldiers of the schedule? As the prize-fighters of career ambition? As faceless troopers marching to the beat of universal consumption and a narrowly defined prosperity?
Yet look at the advice the poem offers! “Don't work so hard for happiness,” it says, “Don't try to force it. Trust to the fruitful ground. To the quiet mind. Trust the riches that come to you free more than the riches that cost so much in spirit to attain."
The poem runs beautifully on:
The equal friend, no grudge, no strife.
No charge of rule, nor governance,
Without disease, the healthful life,
The household of continuance.
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom join'd with simpleness;
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress.
The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.
I wont' try to paraphrase it all. It's clear enough isn't it, that here was a man who, despite the privileges that might have blinded him, (privileges, let's admit it, of wealth and rank that he enjoyed as an earl), understood that true happiness depends not so much on what one can count and control, but on gifts beyond the individual's immediate power to invoke or even precisely define--friendship, human love, intimate social interaction, the ability of food to nourish us, a decent night's rest: none of these, NONE, can be forced into being, or bought, but rather must be accepted as gifts when they arrive, and then tended like a pleasant fire within a general atmosphere of generosity, gratefulness, freedom, common sense, conviviality, and trust.
Now. If such gifts as Henry Howard enumerates truly are the keys to the happy life, how have we lost them?
- We have lost them by lack of reflection.
- We have lost them by asking too much of ourselves in some dimensions, and not enough in others.
- We have lost them by asking too much of the planet.
- We have lost them by forgetting the word "enough."
- We have lost them by taking for our own exclusive use what ought in fairness to belong to others as well.
- We have lost them.
- We have lost them by losing track in our vocations of what makes us personally passionate. We have followed money instead of our hearts.
- We have lost them by neglecting our families.
- We have lost them in the noise and the glare of electronic distraction.
- We have lost them.
- We have lost them by thinking of time as a means to an end (such as making money) and not as pure gift.
- We have lost them by neglecting to cultivate our inner lives with the beauty of art and with the ordinary warmth of the outdoor sun.
- We have lost them in the belief that everything that we humans make for ourselves at great expense is an improvement on what nature gives us for free.
- We have lost them in the foolish belief that power trumps beauty. That speed trumps meditation. That efficiency trumps happiness.
- We have lost them.
Time to consider how to get them back. Time to seek a different way.
HB
It was early 1977, and my family had just moved from South India with its temples and monkeys and identical black bicycles to...well, to Minneapolis, with its skyscrapers and stadiums and malls. So this was a big move. I was eight when we moved away. My brother, whose story I am telling here, was ten. And it must have been soon after our arrival that this incident occurred.
The house in which we were staying was located on 46th Ave South, and it belonged to my grandparents on my father’s side. We were borrowing it, which worked out fine, because the two of them were down in Texas for the winter so that my grandfather could play some golf. He had retired recently and wanted to play the amateur circuit. They were to be away till the late Spring.
Back then the streets of South Minneapolis were still lined with elms. The houses had canvas awnings and stucco siding, and if you went inside of them, they smelled like roast beef and potatoes. The names on the mailboxes were names like Ellingson and Starr and Tollerud and Arnold. And of course ours said Bjornstad.
The nearest heavily trafficked street (or “main drag,” as my father liked to say) lay only about six blocks away. This was Lake Street. And right across Lake stood a convenience store, a Seven Eleven. It was to this Seven Eleven that my mother sent my brother Kris, one winter afternoon.
“For dinner tonight, I need some curd,” she said, handing him some money.
Now most American readers would probably recognize the word “curd” as something out of a nursery rhyme and nothing more: “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey.” Otherwise the word here is rare and about as meaningful as “tuffet.”
But back in India, we had used the word practically every day, because practically every day, we ate the stuff it signified. Curd, when served with curry, cooled the mouth. Plus it added protein to the diet. And when you asked for it at the dinner table, you’d say “could you please pass the curd?” and it arrived in your hands and that was that.
Had my mother forgotten that Americans said “yogurt,” instead of “curd?”
Maybe.
Was she out of her mind anyway, thinking, back in 1977, that there would be yogurt available at the Seven Eleven on Lake Street and 46th? Probably.
But in any case, my brother took her at her word that the errand was possible, and headed out to the Seven Eleven for curd. Though as he left, my mother made sure to tell him--and with some urgency--NOT to cross the street unless the pedestrian light said WALK. Was that understood? If it said DONT WALK, he was not to cross. Was that clear?
Yes he answered, of course he understood.
About thirty minutes later, having successfully crossed Lake Street on WALK, he was at the Seven Eleven, searching for curd. It was, of course, taking him some time. After all, the stuff he was searching for probably wasn’t there, and even if it had been, he was searching for it under the wrong name.
He doubled down on his efforts. He continued to search the aisles: The gum and candy aisle. The snack-cake aisle. The aisle with the batteries and the headache medicine. He also checked and re-checked the fogged-up refrigerated cases containing the ice cream in boxes and the milk in plastic jugs...
Finally the cashier asked what he was looking for.
“Curd,” said my brother.
“Curd, what’s curd?" asked the cashier. What, was the guy kidding? What was my brother supposed to say?
Well so there was nothing for it. My brother left the store, and went and stood on the corner of Lake and 46th, and waited for DONT WALK to turn to WALK. It was winter. It was cold. It was taking a long time.
It was still taking a long time...
The DONT WALK wasn’t changing...
He stood there for fifteen minutes or so, waiting for the light to change to WALK.
“But so why did that happen with the light?” I asked my brother. This was just last week when he told me this story--for what I think was the first time--some thirty-seven years after it happened.
“What do you mean?” he asked, “why did what happen with the light?”
“How come it said WALK getting to the store, but DONT WALK on the way back?”
“I have no idea.”
“And how come you didn’t just press the pedestrian request button to get the light to change?”
“Because I didn’t know you could do that.”
“Mom didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
I considered this for awhile. Then I said:
“Seems kind of existential.”
“How so?”
“Well, I’m thinking, if it had been me, I would have felt as if I was getting a DONT WALK signal because I didn’t have the curd. Because I hadn’t completed the quest.”
“That’s because you take everything so personally. You take the whole universe personally.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Of course it’s true.”
“So what happened?”
“Dad came and got me. Mom must have gotten worried.”
“Figures, she didn’t come herself.”
“She was probably still fixing the dinner.”
So my brother told me this story just this last week. And I can’t get it out of my head. And what I’ve been wondering about it is this: how was his probable emotional state, as he stood on that corner, a ten-year-old, waiting, waiting, really all that different from mine now in middle age?
I’m serious.
Here I am, forty-five years old, and over and over again these days I get the feeling that the big quest on which I was sent when I was born, is just not going all that well. Whatever I was supposed to get; whatever I was supposed to achieve; whatever I was supposed to discover before turning around and heading back home--well I just don’t have it, or I just haven’t done it. I haven’t located and purchased the curd of life. And now it’s starting to get late and what do I do? How do I go back so empty-handed to mother earth? And I wonder if maybe others around me on this planet might feel the same way. Maybe, Dear Reader, you?
“So, what are you looking for?” people ask me, in so many words.
“Well,” I say, “you know, I’m looking for the really nourishing stuff--the curds of life.” And I’m picturing the sunshine and wind and rain. The laughter of friends. My own two hands in the rich black earth. Lots of conversations with family. Campfires. Hymn-sings. The superb pleasure of sitting in a circle in the living room, just passing around someone’s new baby, and commenting on how super-cute her cheeks are, while she gurgles back and smiles.
And of course I’ve HAD that. Sure, sure I’ve experienced all that. But the point is, that I want more of it, so much more, in fact, that it sometimes feels as though I haven’t even had what I’ve had. Plus, as my brother was learning that day at the street corner, the fact is that this whole project of curd isn’t something any of us can really do on our own. Like the angels that sing in choirs “alleluia” and the bees that dance in code, in the middle of a crowd of other bees, saying “here’s the honey, here!” we’re social beings. We're dependent on others for so much of the meaning in our lives. Which means that other people’s poverty of understanding and experience is our own. Inward, outward, material, imaginative, it doesn’t matter. Other people’s poverty is our own.
But these ordinary pleasures: why, in our time, have they become so rare and undervalued? Heck, I have to admit to that I’ve undervalued them myself. I’ve allowed my impatience with people to ruin time spent with them. I’ve devalued and avoided physical labor, simply because it was physical and somehow therefore “below” me. And I believed for ever so long that the only thing wrong with my own privileged life as a citizen of the richest country on the planet was that the privilege wasn’t spread around quite yet. But time would take care of that, right? Time and science and progressive politics and maybe a smattering of the stock market and the Federal Reserve. Right? Right?
I’m working on mending my ways, but it pains me to think of how much meaning and how much real honest life I’ve missed over the years on account of my participation in the "what’s-the-curd-of-life?" lifestyle.
Time to unplug all that smart-stuff and put the i-phones in context. Time to cool it on the packaging. The pure convenience. The consumption. And really cool it. Time for life, real life. Life with the grit in the gears. Life with the grubs on the leaf. Life lived in connection with the earth. Time to encourage other people, by way of example, to do the same.
Maybe my writing here at 9-volt amounts to a kind of penance for me. A way of confessing my collusion with the forces of depletion. A way of trying to nurture the many life-sustaining connections that for so long I have so thoughtlessly lived to prevent. A way of finding and staying happy exactly where I am, and not demanding more of what really does not inwardly satisfy. A way of accepting that others really do have what I need--that I just cannot find meaning on my own. A way of begging for my curds, with a bowl of words.
So how about it? Any curds for a needy nomad? Any curds? Anyone? Any curds?
HB
