Here Is A Morning

Fog’s appearance has brought about a disappearance of brightness and edge and any residue of motivation I possessed. There’s a sense of slowness and softening as whispery white clouds drift over the hillsides, and yesterday we saw sparkling dew-beaded patches of spider webs strewn upon hedges and grass, looking very much like frost. The deck is wet, trees and chairs are dripping, and nothing seems at all compelling.

My first impulse today was to stay in bed reading, which would not have been a bad plan, but I don’t know how long I can justify my lack of creativity or industry by declaring that I’m in recovery mode. Maybe I’m just breathtakingly lazy.

I read an article yesterday in the New York Review of Books (my favorite publication, and as to reading it online, no thanks: I love it in its large paper format) by Marcia Angell called “What Is a Good Life?” Mostly it’s a discussion of the men of the Harvard Grant Study and a recent book on the subject by George E. Vaillant, but its title is a question I’ve often asked myself, and Angell’s closing paragraph (preceded by a listing of small personal pleasures as well as her fears for the state of the world) spoke straight to me:

Nearly everyone over a certain age observes that time seems to pass much more quickly, and I am no exception. So extreme is the acceleration that I wonder whether it isn’t a result of some physical law, not just a perception. Maybe it’s akin to Einstein’s discovery that as speed increases, time slows. Perhaps this is the reverse––as our bodies slow, time speeds up. In any case, the rush of my days is in stark contrast to the magically endless days of my girlhood. I also find it hard to remember that I’m no longer young, despite the physical signs, since I’m the same person and in many ways have the same feelings. It’s particularly disquieting to recall that many people and places I knew no longer exist, except in my memories. Still, although I dislike the fact that my days are going by so quickly, that’s the way it is, and I’ve had a good run…

Maybe one of the gifts of these foggy days is the illusion of stillness they offer, the excuse not to be doing, the daydream of time’s pace ever-so-subtly decreasing.

Earlier this year, my mother’s injury and ongoing problems thrust me into an exhausting crisis mode that required a straight-on confrontation with the realities of old age and end of life. There’s nothing unusual in this: people my age everywhere are dealing with depressing implications of elderly parents in declining health. Usually we are able to intermittently withdraw and think about something else entirely, but this situation had a relentless quality about it for a while.

In retrospect, I coped with it pretty well, and she has been able to return to her assisted living facility to live out whatever remaining time she has with a reasonable degree of comfort and calm. I've been able to step back a bit and I'm not going down there every week.

Still, sleeping demons are aroused and ready to joust, and there’s plenty of unpleasant business to tend to, and I'm living with that suddenly close-up and unequivocal visual of where we’re all headed, which raises questions about how best to spend now.

Mostly, I'm just sort of tired.

One interesting diversion has been contact (through the wonders of technology) with the children (age 70 and 60-something) of a man named Ray who was my father’s dearest boyhood friend. It started with the scrap of an old letter, a return address, a faded photo or two, and my own recollections of the fondness with which my father spoke of his buddy. Ray died in the 1960s of cancer at the age of 53, my father of a heart attack a decade or so later.

Believe me, the realistic and analytical side of me fully understands that their long-ago friendship is of no relevance to anything current or important, and that Ray’s grown kids and I have no reason at all to be in touch. In fact, their family moved away from Brooklyn to Phoenix in the 1950s, and we never even met.

And yet. I cannot resist the lure of stories, nonetheless. And along with staying in bed reading on foggy days, exploring stories from the distant past may be another way to play at slowing the relentless rush forward. Ray’s kids and I share nothing but an old inherited history, and even that is vague, but I love picturing our handsome fathers stepping out into the world, a’gleam with dreams, the sons of immigrants born into rough neighborhoods, decks stacked against them, but possibilities piled higher. I know that struggles ensued, and great disappointments, but here we are, the next generation, partaking of wonder as though it were commonplace.

Our correspondence is the unlikely fallout from something that happened lifetimes ago, and to me it feels comical, delicious, vaguely defiant of time.

Thinking of all this, I return to a letter from my friend Dan Gerber, whose letters to me over the last few years collectively form a volume of wisdom that I value more each day. Here he quotes Jack Kornfield:

In the Jewish mystical tradition, a great rabbi taught his disciples to memorize and contemplate the teaching and to place the prayers and holy words on their hearts. One day a student asked the rabbi why he always used the phrase ‘on your heart’ and not ‘in your heart’. The master replied, ‘Only time and grace can put the essence of these stories in your heart. Here we recite and learn them and put them on our hearts hoping that someday when our heart breaks they will fall in.

Stories are falling into my heart. Some are tumbling in heavily, some––barely remembered ancient tales predating my existence––are seeping in and settling, and others are shining in, like light. Perhaps it’s best, then, if I remain still for awhile…receiving.

Here’s something else my friend Dan wrote to me:

So yes, things naturally become a bit more poignant when you become aware of your death, just off to the left, and that is a great blessing. It's what the Japanese call mono no aware, to be aware of the sadness of things, to be aware of beauty. The Greeks believed the gods had the option to make man mortal or immortal and chose mortal so that we would have compassion. Also, I might add, so that we would have art and poetry and love and music and all those things that make our lives worth living. Immortality would be a pretty barren and brutal way to live, as so many stories of the gods assure us. Mercy and pity was not their long suit. As Rilke would have it, we are immortal, at least in that, "having been once, it can never be cancelled." For me, to be immortal is to live our lives so as not to miss anything. At least that's my aspiration. I'm better at it mornings than I am in the afternoon.

I’m better at it in the mornings, too.

And here is a morning.

Subscribe