Walk on

Greetings Everyone,

So what happens when you make yourself out to be a writer and the words don’t come? I should probably say ‘the right words’ because I could fill the page up with whining in no time at all. I have done so three times already this morning. (You should be thanking God for the delete button).

I’m having trouble coming to grips with 'why' I write this morning. Sometimes it seems so pointless to work so hard and nothing ever really seem to come from it. Why do we do what we do?

I read this week about David Wallace Foster, a novelist whom I have never read or even heard of until yesterday, but somehow managed to get a book on the top 100 books of the century or the week or something. In 2005 he gave the commencement address to the graduating class of Kenyon college. The following are some excerpts:

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?""

"If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance…"

"The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about…"

"If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship..." [editor’s note: You get to be God]

"Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infragible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on."

"Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."

"I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water.""

"It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

............

A couple of weeks ago Mr. Foster decided the things he believed in were just too hard to do and so he put a rope around his neck and hung himself in the closet. He never made it to 50. They said he had been depressed.

What’s not to be depressed about? I’m surprised the whole graduating class didn’t shoot themselves in the head at the end of his speech.

And yet I know exactly where he is coming from. I know what it’s like to feel trapped in your own head. But just because I know what it feels like doesn’t mean that I am. I can hope because this is not my world. I can find a glimmer of meaning in understanding that there is a plan that is outside the human race. That is the only place I can find hope. Because apart from that, apart from knowing that there is a plan of which I am an integral part, with purpose and meaning regardless of what I can see or how I feel about it or even what the outcome will be, I am in the same boat as David Wallace Foster.

The only other alternative is to stop thinking and put it in auto pilot – welcome to mainstream America.

Perhaps Tonio K says it best:

like my father before me, i consider a past i can't understandas i grasp at a moment that slips through my handsand i stumble toward a future concealed in a hazehalf faith and half fear and my innocent vision's no longer so clear

i walk on

now i don't know where the days go, they turn into weeksthey turn into years summers turn into Christmas and they all disappearand children turn from their childlike trust as their laughter is turned into tearsstill they listen for the voices that we all used to hear

they walk on

from the flash of conception to the flowers on the gravefrom the joy of a birth to the coming of agefrom the freedom of the schoolyard to the man at his workfrom the safety of a mother's arms to the ends of the earth

we walk on

we walk on through the darkness we walk on toward the lightthrough the confusion and illusion through the floods and the firewe walk back to the future walk away from the flamewe walk back to the beginning where we're given a new name

we walk on

Why do I write? Because it is my calling in the plan of God- no other reason is reason enough.

Dear God, Save me from myself.

Grace, peace and reality to you all,
Brad