Tag: Everyday Zen

Why Are We Avoiding Paradise?

This past weekend was full of endings and beginnings.  Friday was Halloween, which – of course – marks the end of my favorite month, but is also the Eve of All Saints Day, when we remember the saintly dead.  That is followed by All Souls Day, when we remember all the dead. And, of course, it was the beginning of a new month, and the time when we turned back the clocks.  A propitious time for self-reflection.  November is the time of year which corresponds (metaphorically) with my age.  I have a few challenges ahead of me in the next few weeks, but both the young trick-or-treating ghouls and the thoughts of lost souls remind me of how good it is to be alive.  We somehow left Paradise behind as we grew up; can we regain it in old age?

That we are already in Paradise is something that is hard to comprehend and easy to forget.  I think often of the words of Joko Beck in her wonderful Everyday Zen (where she seems to talk directly to John Milton!):

There is no paradise lost, none to be regained.  Why?  Because you cannot avoid this moment.  You may not be awake to it, but it is always here.  You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.

You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.   Can it be true that the pathetic work of our long lives has been to hold paradise at bay?

Did we have paradise once and lose it?  Or did we just push it into a corner and place a fierce angel to guard the gates?  James Baldwin is much taken with such thoughts of paradise.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. (Giovanni’s Room)

Wordsworth is sure that, as infants, we brought paradise (trailing clouds of glory) into the world with us, but lost it, forgot it, along the way:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

But why should we forget?  From “The Old Fools” by Philip Larkin, one of the most miserable and cynical poems about old age there is, comes this remarkable passage:

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here.

“The million-petalled flower of being here.”  If that is not paradise, if just the possibilities and potentialities of “being here” is not paradise, I do not know what is. And yet, I forget.  We all forget.  As Frederick Buechner puts it, we allow “Too good not be true” to turn into “too good to be true.”  In other words, paradise is all around us; we ourselves have put up the barriers, the angels with their shining swords are hired by us and paid a monthly wage to stop us from going back to where we belong.  Is that it? 

Beck implies that being old, being closer to death, should help us along with this process, if we let it.

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way they want it to.  Then they can see that the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below] – because that’s all there is, this very moment.

No one but we, ourselves, can dismiss the flaming swords. It is our paradise to take or to leave. No teacher needed, no secret key.  Here is some more advice from Joko Beck:

I’ll tell you how far I’d walk to see a new teacher: maybe across the room, no farther! It isn’t because I have no interest in this person; it’s just that there is no one who can tell me about my life except—who? There is no authority outside of my experience. There is only one teacher. What is that teacher? Life itself. And of course each one of us is a manifestation of life; we couldn’t be anything else. Now life happens to be both a severe and an endlessly kind teacher. It’s the only authority that you need to trust. And this teacher, this authority, is everywhere.

Old people have seen a lot of life.  If there is one thing that we have, it is experience.  We need to trust ourselves, dismiss the shining swords, and enter the paradise that is ours by right.  What are the odds that we would even exist?  That we should persist over all these decades?  We beat those odds; we should be glad to collect the prize.  Or, at least, that is what I keep telling myself. 

I’ll end on this bright November day with a quote from Emerson:

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise; the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.  (from “New England Reformers”)

In our old age, let’s storm the gates of Paradise.   Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in your midst.  Beck and Emerson tell us all we have to do is to change our perspective.  Change is hard in old age, but perhaps we could at least try.  Time is short.

Several years ago, I wrote a story about a woman’s misguided attempts to create paradise on earth, rather than just opening her eyes to it.  You can find it here.  I also posted a strange story about one last trip “Back to the Garden,” about finding paradise at the very last minute. 

Fantasies to Reject in Old Age (or Sooner)

Youth is a time for fantasy, but it occurs to me that we may never outgrow some illusions.  The nature of our fantasies changes as we age (Santa Claus and Prince Charming may have been discarded), but our need for such magical thinking apparently does not.  I have been reading Swamplands of the Soul, by the Jungian James Hollis, which is a far more uplifting book than you might expect from the title.  Hollis and others whom I will discuss think that elderly fantasies are not entirely harmless.  And if you think you don’t have any such illusions, please read on.

Hollis is particularly interesting on the subject of aging and fantasy. He says that there are at least a couple of fantasies that we all need to reject as we grow old:

The two greatest fantasies we are obliged to relinquish in the second half of life are that we are immortal exceptions to the human condition, and that out there somewhere is some “Magical Other” who will rescue us from existential isolation.

My body has been working hard to convince me that it won’t last forever; so, I think I have probably come close to accepting my mortality (ask me on my deathbed).   But the “rescue” fantasy is harder – and it includes, according to Hollis, “Taking responsibility for choices, to cease blaming others or expecting rescue from them, …and to accept the pain of loneliness.”   I do have trouble with the blame thing – partly because my family of origin loved the blame game and partly because it is indeed an easy way of avoiding responsibility.  I have spent countless hours with therapists, siblings, and friends detailing the sins of the childhood that made me what I am.  But that’s over.  The older I get, the surer I am that those recalled injustices just don’t matter anymore.

As for the “Magical Other,” I think I have finally learned that no one can rescue me from myself.  I also realized over time that it was not simply a knight in shining armor I was looking for to redeem me. I often fell prey to the false belief that more money, another house, a new situation, a grand trip could do the job – never seeing that any remediation for “existential isolation” comes from acceptance within.

Much “magical thinking” is the product of conceiving our life as a story.  As James Carse says in his wonderful Infinite Games, “Because we know our lives to have the character of narrative, we also [think] we know what the narrative is…. [But] true story tellers do not know their own story.”

And of course, if we have a story, we want a happy ending.  This is another fantasy to reject in old age (related to Hollis’s second one).  My husband and I have recently lost the last of our parents, and it is clear that life’s end may be many things, but it is seldom happy and often it is quite the opposite.  The old have happy moments, happy memories – but to tell ourselves that everything will come out right in the end (think Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is indulging in a fantasy.   Many of us delay making necessary changes to our lives because we picture a quiet deathbed scene in our own bed, with loving (and not burnt out from taking care of us) friends and relatives holding our hands and playing our favorite music.  May it be so for you, but I hope I know enough not to count on it.  But accepting this does not mean despair.  Joko Beck posited that it could mean something else entirely:

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way the want it to.  Then they can see the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below – you may know the story] – because that is all there is, this very moment. (Everyday Zen)

It is easy for me to say that I accept Hollis’s imperatives to accept mortality and to reject optimistic fantasies and magical thinking.  It is not easy to do, and recidivism occurs frequently.  Young children often cannot tell fantasy from reality; dreams seem real, Santa’s reindeer can fly, and there really are monsters under the bed.  We are older, but are we wiser?  We justify telling lies to children to protect them, to make the world seem less threatening.  An argument might be made that elders need the same protections.  I will, however, keep trying to “put away childish things.”

Jorge Borges wrote a story, “August 25, 1983,” in which he imagines his own death.  Using his format, I did something similar and found it an interesting exercise.  I highly recommend both the story and the exercise.  What do you think you will have to say at the end of your life?  What was important, transformational, disappointing?  Look at it as practice in dealing with reality.

I would also recommend a wonderful book by Stephen Levine, “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last.”  It inspired my story, “Encore.”