It has been my conceit to believe that I am open to new ideas, to new possibilities beyond my ordinary reckoning, but this weekend at the cabin taught me what a conceit this was.
In the five years that we have owned it, I have never been there with my wife alone - it has always been with our son. Other friends have gone up, but of course it's my cabin and they did things according to my custom (how much so I never imagined.) But with my wife, someone who over the decades has lost most illusions about me, I found myself disturbed that she instantly took over MY tea drinking spot and MY guitar couch. She also had to go to bed earlier and wake later, a problem in a tiny cabin with an open loft where every move resounds like a sound box (not a good place to take another couple with whom one is not on very intimate grounds, as I found out before.) It was built on the model of another cabin that I helped some friends with in Vermont when we were in our 20's - when piling in nearly on top of one another was normal and somewhat cozy.
It seems that "cozy" isn't the operative word for me now. A few years ago when I found myself complaining too much, I realized that I was becoming "the grumpy old man." I determined to not become the grumpy old man. But it was not until this visit that I realized the true nature of the grumpy older person; they have their lives set. They do not want their comfortable routines broken. When they are, they complain. Grumpy, grumpy.
I adjusted because I had to, and we had an excellent time, but the truth remains - I am as caught in my habits as anyone else my own age. I have changed remarkably from those cozy days when having a roommate in a tiny college cell was normal and sometimes fun. The idea now is appalling. With a wife, yes; with the world? Not in your life, and I never even realized this had happened. In my hitchhiking days I dreamed of a Utopian commune and found that I was too individualistic, regardless of my dreams. Now even the idea sounds ridiculous. I want my tea-drinking spot!
If it were only that, I could shrug and forget about it, but with habits of actions, one might also expect habits of thinking. Yes, I am open to inter-dimensional travel, the truth in a multitude of religions, ghosts, even aliens and flying saucers, but what of other political ideas? What of other visions for our country and for the world? Further, what of the nature of Truth itself, of God or non-god, of the very nature and reason for existence?
Over time, many of us - certainly me - make a prison of life. Thomas Keating, whose book I am starting, tells us that we must make an ego for ourselves to become separate, so that God might see himself from another perspective, but that in doing so, most of us err. Somewhere in adolescence we absorb the ethos of our culture and so continue the collective narrowness - we believe in the status symbols and hierarchies that we were fed, and so continue as if these make the nut of life, as if these should form our goals. We seldom see, and certainly seldom live, life as a mature human being should - as beings cast in the image of eternity, made from nothing, adrift in infinity, and capable of cosmic realization. Instead, we cling to our security blankets, as banal as they are.
In adolescence we incorporate our cultural flatness, but
we are still closer to the openness that we need to expand, to become more. If we don't watch out, with age that window narrows to almost nothing. We are left with a comfortable little jail cell of our own making, afraid to change our place on the couch or our ideas about the most important things of all - if we even allow ourselves to think about them. We are given many chances, for the greater world breaks in at many times, but these breaks we often see as misfortunes. We - certainly me - want things to go as planned, according to our version of the cultural template. And I would say with hindsight - one of the great things about age - that viewing the wrongs in our lives as simply misfortunes is a mistake.
The very old sometimes do become wise. One of the things that I have often heard them say is, "I wouldn't want to change a thing about my (past) life," and I have often gasped. What? You wouldn't change marrying the wrong person, selling your house at the wrong time, taking that wrong turn that caused an accident and your constant back pain? But they often really mean it, and sometimes now I can see why. It is the twists and turns from habit and cultural conformity that not only make life interesting, but also give us the texture, the nuance that we need to see the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is better because it is true, and the truth of existence is greater than anything we can imagine. Only with openness, which begins with trust, can a larger vision come to us, not from our conditioned past, but from what is outside our little cells. FK
In the five years that we have owned it, I have never been there with my wife alone - it has always been with our son. Other friends have gone up, but of course it's my cabin and they did things according to my custom (how much so I never imagined.) But with my wife, someone who over the decades has lost most illusions about me, I found myself disturbed that she instantly took over MY tea drinking spot and MY guitar couch. She also had to go to bed earlier and wake later, a problem in a tiny cabin with an open loft where every move resounds like a sound box (not a good place to take another couple with whom one is not on very intimate grounds, as I found out before.) It was built on the model of another cabin that I helped some friends with in Vermont when we were in our 20's - when piling in nearly on top of one another was normal and somewhat cozy.
It seems that "cozy" isn't the operative word for me now. A few years ago when I found myself complaining too much, I realized that I was becoming "the grumpy old man." I determined to not become the grumpy old man. But it was not until this visit that I realized the true nature of the grumpy older person; they have their lives set. They do not want their comfortable routines broken. When they are, they complain. Grumpy, grumpy.
I adjusted because I had to, and we had an excellent time, but the truth remains - I am as caught in my habits as anyone else my own age. I have changed remarkably from those cozy days when having a roommate in a tiny college cell was normal and sometimes fun. The idea now is appalling. With a wife, yes; with the world? Not in your life, and I never even realized this had happened. In my hitchhiking days I dreamed of a Utopian commune and found that I was too individualistic, regardless of my dreams. Now even the idea sounds ridiculous. I want my tea-drinking spot!
If it were only that, I could shrug and forget about it, but with habits of actions, one might also expect habits of thinking. Yes, I am open to inter-dimensional travel, the truth in a multitude of religions, ghosts, even aliens and flying saucers, but what of other political ideas? What of other visions for our country and for the world? Further, what of the nature of Truth itself, of God or non-god, of the very nature and reason for existence?
Over time, many of us - certainly me - make a prison of life. Thomas Keating, whose book I am starting, tells us that we must make an ego for ourselves to become separate, so that God might see himself from another perspective, but that in doing so, most of us err. Somewhere in adolescence we absorb the ethos of our culture and so continue the collective narrowness - we believe in the status symbols and hierarchies that we were fed, and so continue as if these make the nut of life, as if these should form our goals. We seldom see, and certainly seldom live, life as a mature human being should - as beings cast in the image of eternity, made from nothing, adrift in infinity, and capable of cosmic realization. Instead, we cling to our security blankets, as banal as they are.
In adolescence we incorporate our cultural flatness, but
we are still closer to the openness that we need to expand, to become more. If we don't watch out, with age that window narrows to almost nothing. We are left with a comfortable little jail cell of our own making, afraid to change our place on the couch or our ideas about the most important things of all - if we even allow ourselves to think about them. We are given many chances, for the greater world breaks in at many times, but these breaks we often see as misfortunes. We - certainly me - want things to go as planned, according to our version of the cultural template. And I would say with hindsight - one of the great things about age - that viewing the wrongs in our lives as simply misfortunes is a mistake.
The very old sometimes do become wise. One of the things that I have often heard them say is, "I wouldn't want to change a thing about my (past) life," and I have often gasped. What? You wouldn't change marrying the wrong person, selling your house at the wrong time, taking that wrong turn that caused an accident and your constant back pain? But they often really mean it, and sometimes now I can see why. It is the twists and turns from habit and cultural conformity that not only make life interesting, but also give us the texture, the nuance that we need to see the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is better because it is true, and the truth of existence is greater than anything we can imagine. Only with openness, which begins with trust, can a larger vision come to us, not from our conditioned past, but from what is outside our little cells. FK
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