We were on a walk a few years ago with a woman I usually try to avoid walking with.  Oh, she’s interesting and we get along, but she has three dogs who she treats as her children, shrieking at them whenever they cross each other’s leash line or when they make a dash to eat something long dead by the path.   These are morning walks and as such I usually require some degree of peace, easing rather than lurching into the day. 
 
            Not so that day and not so peace with her, either.  But, as I said, she is interesting and not shy about her opinions.  So it was that somehow we got talking about heaven and/or reincarnation (hillbilly version: reintarnation.  Groan, but I just love it) and she proclaimed loudly that she was excited about the whole idea, and hoped to be reborn again and again.  To which my wife and I said simultaneously, “And re-do junior high?”  As I can never leave anything obvious alone, I continued: “And getting yelled at in high school, and going through break-ups and bad bosses and embarrassing drunks and hang-overs and…”  There would have been no end to it, but she stopped me short with a look of serious inquisition, saying, “Really?  You don’t like life?” 
 
            That did put me back a touch.  I do like life overall.  Actually, I am absolutely blown away by certain aspects of life, from stunning sunsets to great sex.  A decent beer buzz ain’t too bad either.  But to do it all over again, the whole shebang of disappointment and embarrassment and, frankly, pain?  Are you kidding?
 
“Don’t forget the pain,” I added.  “The pain and the fear.  Each time you live, you die.  Isn’t that kind of like hell on earth?”  I thought I had her with that one, but she continued to disagree – this from a woman who had alcoholic parents, whose sister was a prostitute, who herself had three children by two men before age 23, and who has had lots and lots of heartbreaks since.  I had to admire her, but I sure as hell continued to disagree.
 
My wife and I are not the only ones, as a certain young man I know is absolutely convinced that life is actually not what we think at all, but living hell.  To him this is not a matter of bitter resentment but logic, and, now that I am thinking about it, I am beginning to agree, at least a little.  I think I can best describe that opinion by comparing Buddhist/Hindu philosophy with Christian theology.
 
Life, says the Buddha, is illusion and pain and loss, illusion because it is absolutely transitory, and loss and pain – well, just look around and see.  Until we rid ourselves of every attachment, he says, we will continue in this illusion with never-ending deaths and rebirths, our lives at any one time corresponding to our lives in previous times.  Because only about one in a hundred million achieve non-attachment – what some call enlightenment – in any time period, rebirth is a perpetual death sentence for nearly all of us, our attachments to this illusion forcing us back into the (ultimately) painful, fear-filled lives we are so familiar with.  In other words, we are sent back from death to die again after every life that we have lived imperfectly.  That is, we are sent back to die in perpetuity, which sounds more and more like hell to me. 
 
Ah, and then there is poor, uncool Christianity, which I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot miter as a young man.  Where is the sparkle of your China, the smile of your Japan, aka, the exotic, in Christianity?  More than that, the Christianity I knew, Catholicism, had loads of guilt due to sin, with much of that guilt and sin attached to sex.  I liked sex and didn’t see anything wrong with it, with the exception of the occasional abortion or suicidal break-up when things went sideways.  There are rules in Christianity, and there is damnation for not following the rules.  There is nothing like that in Buddhism.  You just keep getting reborn in situations based on actions in past lives.  What could possibly go wrong with that? 
 
To me, when written out, it seems so clear; for every "wrong," one is condemned to suffer for it in the next life, and so on.  So it seems that from the standpoint of Buddhist belief, life is hell.  There is no eternal damnation in it, but perfection is nearly impossible, condemning us to millions upon millions of lives filled with pain and death, which is about as close to eternity as we can get.  According to Hindu theology, when an age of millions of lives passes, we then move on to another age, and then to another, and then another, for all time.  For most, then, rebirth is forever, with its intendent pain and disappointment and tragedy and death. 
 
The New Testament talks incessantly of everlasting life to those who believe and to everlasting death to those who do not.  This everlasting death reflects, to me, the everlasting deaths of Eastern theology.  But for Christians, the everlasting life is available to everyone, right now, not because one is perfect, which for Christians is an impossibility due to original sin, but because one has faith in Jesus.  Jesus is the short-cut that was not available to the East, nor to anyone before Christ, at least according to the Christians. 
 
And so it is that for Christians, life is turned from hell into a materialistic purgatory, a middle-earth where one can be either condemned or saved.  Attachment is permitted, although it should never be greater than one’s attachment to God.  Love is encouraged, although it should not fall on one and not the other.  Humanity, then, does not exist in a perpetual hell, each of us in a constant battle with human nature, but rather, in a testing ground where human nature must be perfected – that is, where being who we are is OK as long as we strive to purify our motives.  As St Paul said, we each are of the same body, each performing our tasks in conjunction with the others, through whom the entire body lives.  It is because we can remain human that Christians have sin rather than “attachment,” for loving attachment is permitted in the Christian world.  Sin is a human error, but love is not – and love can and does begin with the human condition. 
 
Which is cooler, then?  A guide to heaven or a guide to reincarnation?  And which of the two imagines us more into Hell?  It’s a big ‘fer sure’ that I do not like the idea of eternal damnation, but I love the idea of eternal redemption from this life alone, all my faults and humanity included.  In either case, it is spine-tinglingly cool that Christian and Buddhist theologies reiterate core ideas in their own way, with the exception of the Redemption of Christ – although, even there, there are the avatars of the East.  It seems through this reiteration that there is truth in both, both given to us by God or “the unspeakable,” telling us that life might be both hell on earth, as well as merely a transit to a better – and sometimes worse – world. 
 
Do we get to pick our own way?  
 
Perhaps we do; perhaps it is that Heaven does allow us to choose a direction, as my friend with the dogs has, and I have, but in a serious way that really counts; that is, that we might be able to actually choose either to live to die and live and die again and again, or to live until we die and then live on forever, without death ever again.  This brings up all sorts of ideas about attachment and our core being, and it might even be that Hell is only as we define it, as my friend and I already have in our different ways.  Hell, then, might just be a choice rather than a condemnation, as has often been said in both the East and the West.  And as both also say, someday we will most certainly find out – at least once.
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

Today, the traditional Christmas essay, taken from my book, Beneath the Turning Stars, under "Essays" on the website. 

No kidding, I still get a little moist around the eyes reading it, five years after its publication.  I read it to my mother over the phone as she lay dying the year before as well.  What can I say, but that  we all have a Christmas essay in us, written or not.  FK    

​ 
It was a Saturday, late afternoon, and I must have been watching the Wolverines win another great game under Bo Schembechler, Michigan’s legendary coach, because by the time the bell rang I was already feeling effusively friendly.   It was an epidemiology grad student taking surveys of life-styles and habits for long-term study, to see who would die and why and when over the next 50 years.  I thought that pretty impressive, leaving such studies for future generations, but then again, most things would have seemed wonderfully impressive to me at that point.  In any case, I welcomed her in and sat joyfully for the interview which almost didn’t happen, as I was a ‘student transitory,’ but I assured her (falsely, it turns out) that I would be in Ann Arbor a long time.  Face it, I just wanted someone to talk to, especially a not-too-shabby female grad student. 
 
No, we did not bond and I cannot even remember her face, but I do remember one of the life-style questions that did not involve smoking (I did at the time), excessive drinking (ditto), and lots of fatty and salty foods (for me, I had whatever was cheapest).  It was this: “Do you ever stop now and then and take stock of your life?” 
 
I remember looking at her with uncomprehending eyes at first, my mind not accustomed to such thought back then when everything was about my soon-to-be glorious future, before I replied, “Why, no, not at all.  Could you give me a hint as to what that might entail?”     
 
“You know” she said nervously, eying the third quart of Budweiser I had just opened, “where you are in life, how you are meeting or not meeting your goals, that sort of thing.” 
 
            “Oh,” I said, and I can only imagine the farcical look I got on my face at that time.  “Let me see…Nope.  Can’t say I do.  Life, “I said wisely,” is to be lived, not to be regretted or parsed (I was as wordy then as now).  I live for the day and look forward to tomorrow.  That’s about it.” 
 
            I don’t think I disappointed her.  As a matter of fact, she was probably reviewing my data in her head at that very instant, thinking, “This guy’s one of those that die really young.” 
 
            She will never know, and for all I know, she is dead, pensive thoughts of her past and present predicament aside.  I can no longer die young, although I can and might die younger than average.  I no longer smoke, rarely, although occasionally, drink three quarts of beer, and cannot bear to watch Wolverine football, as Jim Harbaugh simply cannot ever, ever beat Ohio State.  However, I do take stock now and far too often, even though I hate the phrase, as it sounds like something the guidance counselor would have told me back in high school.  It is here that I wish to confess this shameful truth, and here where I will finally want to do something far more constructive: take stock of taking stock. 
 
            Stock: my professional dreams lie in shambles, unrecoverable after so many decades.  In fact, anything I have done in the past thirty years to advance a professional agenda has failed, at least slightly and usually grandly, including teaching, editing, and writing.  On the other hand, I happened into certain real estate deals that often included carpentry and other menial skills that I had to learn on the fly, which were never intended to make money but did, far more than I would have imagined, but not, as another famous realtor would say, “bigly.”  But bigly enough. 
 
I had also assumed that I would be traveling the world with government grants, delving into interesting backwaters and bearing, boastfully, the scars to prove it.  As it turned out, I have done a lot of travel, at my own expense, most often in the US with a tent or trailer, but often enough overseas, where I have tales of jet-lag to prove it.  I have not ended up living in an exotic local, like La Paz or Addis Ababa, but I have ended up, apparently forever, in a state far from my own: not exactly one on the edge of discovery or wonder, but one close enough to Chicago to allow me to wonder at how a city can operate with a multi-billion dollar deficit.  
 
Taking such stock should reveal a life of mediocracy and semi-failure.  However, as I now look wonderingly at the sagacity of my youthful take on such thoughts, it becomes clear that taking stock is, or at least often is, an enormous waste of time, just as I had thought.  Certainly, life has not turned out how I thought it should have, and I have taken stock of that with bitter disappointment on more occasions than I can count in the last fifteen years.  However, in taking stock of taking stock, it has also become clear to me that such an enterprise is not only futile, but harmful; and not only harmful, but entirely unrealistic. 
 
It is so clear now.  When I was 9, what I wanted most were guns and knives and fireworks.  Taking stock of my life back then would have related those desires to their fulfillment.  If I had just received a new .22 and managed to buy a half-gross of cherry bombs, taking stock would have revealed a glorious present and perhaps a glorious future, or so I would have thought.  I would not think that today or even 40 years ago, for that matter.  Taking stock when I was 9, then, might have driven me to secure a path to more guns and explosives, which would have left me bereft of fulfillment by the age of, let’s say, 15.  Because I had taken stock at 9, I might have seriously harmed my realization of new heart-felt desires just a few later. 
 
This is an extreme example, but I have seen it with my friends and acquaintances, as well as with myself over the years: that is, that we often continue to measure ourselves in the present by world views that are starkly atavistic, throwbacks to a past that have little relevance now.  This would include such things as political leanings cultivated in college, and marks of status or wealth in grades of professional accomplishments or in amounts and quality of possessions. 
 
For instance, in undergrad college I thought that free-love communes would be my ideal place.  I now would be absolutely appalled by them, mostly because of the necessary annihilation of most individual free thought necessary to make communes work.  More to the point of the time and place of that interview back in Bo Schembechler’s day, I craved success in my profession more than anything else.  Today, such success would mean little to me, or even be seen as harmful to my current desires and hopes for future growth.  And yet, my failure to fulfill that old desire is exactly the reason I have often lamented my current state of affairs.
 
In other words, in recent times, I have taken stock of myself with the view of life from a past that is no longer relevant to my current desires or needs for fulfillment.  This is why so many successful people are less happy than they thought they would be:  by the time they have fulfilled a need from the past, they have matured past that need, often without even knowing it. 
 
I have read that Hugh Heffner died an unhappy, miserable old man, even though he had long fulfilled his need for limitless sex and great wealth and recognition.  It is my bet that something in him – we might call it his soul – had already moved past those earlier desires, but his success had trapped him in the desires from the past.  No matter how much Viagra he took or how much more he could make from his empire, it could no longer satisfy; and the bitch of it is that he probably never understood his conundrum or self-made prison.
 
Which isn’t to say that I have any right to deem myself superior to those who have reached success in an honorable profession or through wise and honest investment.  I might want to and probably have, but that is a crock, a trick for those who themselves are trapped in bitterness over their own failure to reach an earlier, more immature goal.  Instead, what I have found is that we have to take stock first of our most recent discoveries before we look at our movement towards past desires.  This might be what the grad student epidemiologist was looking for anyway: not so much that we took stock of ourselves, but how we took stock of ourselves.  Do we compare our accomplishments to outdated goals?  Or do we look at how we are now and where we should go, ready to change direction completely for the realization of different, higher goals? 
 
 It could be, but I don’t think so; in her mind, as we see from epidemiologist now in the era of Corona, what mattered most to her was living a long and physically healthy life.  That is fine, but think what such an ideal would have looked like to men such as St Francis or St Paul, people who thought so little of their bodies and lives that it was a joy for them to sacrifice it all for their higher beliefs.  Just imagine that degree of maturity; and just imagine people such as these taking stock of themselves, knowing that no goal could ever be higher than their own.
 
            I am not there with the saints and probably will not come close until I lie broken and exhausted on my death bed.  But I now recognize that I have obtained some of the best things on earth already – the security of a good home and loving family – as well as a final goal that can never be exceeded, displaced or disappoint.  Taking stock of this taking of stock, I might say of myself, “not bad, but you still have a long way to go.” This might not seem like much, but it is a far better self-assessment than I would have made back when Michigan used to beat Ohio State. 
 
   
 
 

Today, another new essay, "You Must Go Home Again," posted under Essays in the website.  FK