August 27: "Tipping Point," Life Balance, Rain

I usually struggle this time of year.  The end of summer, on the verge of autumn.  Start of another schoolyear.

This August, in particular, the struggle has been fairly acute.  My daughter interviewing for medical school.  My aunt having a stroke and being diagnosed with metastatic cancer.  My son attending Middle College.  My whole life balance has shifted in very big ways.

Billy Collins writes about balance . . .

Tipping Point

by: Billy Collins

At home, the jazz station plays all day,

so sometimes it becomes indistinct, 

like the sound of rain, 

birds in the background, the surf of traffic. 

But today I heard a voice announce 

that Eric Dolphy, 36 when he died, 

has now been dead for 36 years. 

I wonder – 

did anyone sense something 

when another Eric Dolphy lifetime 

was added to the span of his life, 

when we all took another 

full Dolphy step forward in time, 

flipped over the Eric Dolphy yardstick once again? 

It would have been so subtle – 

like the sensation you might feel 

as you passed through the moment 

at the exact center of your life 

or as you crossed the equator at night in a boat. 

I never gave it another thought, 

but could that have been the little shift 

I sensed a while ago 

as I walked down in the rain to get the mail?

It rained today.  A lot.  It's still raining.  A huge change from the 90-degree sauna of a yesterday.  

I wish I could roll with all the changes brought on by September.  The pumpkin spice beverages and shampoos and baked goods, for instance  I'm not a fan of pumpkin anything, for the most part.  The shorter days.  I drove home tonight at around 9 p.m., and it was almost completely dark already.  Frost on the windows in the mornings.  Hasn't happened yet, but it will soon.

Faithful disciples of this blog know my feelings about change.  It ranks right up there with prostate exams and Donald Trump.  I prefer stability, even though many therapists have told me that stability can lead to stagnation.  It's just that most of my adult working life has centered on huge shifts every three or four months, brought on by my livelihood as a university instructor.

This year, however, feels like I'm on the cusp of huge shifts over which I have very little to no control.  That doesn't sit well with me.  While I know it may be false, I prefer at least an illusion of agency in my life.  However, kids grow up, move away, get married.  Summer gives way to fall gives way to winter.  Loved ones get sick.  Not much I can do about any of that stuff.

Don't worry.  I'm not sinking into the Swamp of Sadness.  (Bonus points for those of you who catch that allusion to The Neverending Story.)  I'm just at a tipping point, and I'm not ready to let go of summer's freedom yet.  I promise I will write something completely silly tomorrow.

In the meantime, Saint Marty's going to turn off all the lights, sit in his dark living room, and wallow a little while, listening to the rain outside.

October 24: Great Thought, "The Neverending Story," Miracles

Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  Humanists seized on the expression, but it was hardly news.  We knew, looking around, that a thought branches and leafs, a tree comes to a conclusion.  But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine, for a machinist can of course wipe his hands and leave, and his simple machine still hums; but if the thinker's attention strays for a minute, his simplest thought ceases altogether.  And, as I have stressed, the place where we so incontrovertibly find ourselves, whether thought or machine, is at least not in any way simple.

Such an interesting argument.  Is the universe some great machine put into motion by God like some divine mechanic firing up a generator?  Or is it a notion, like Einstein's relativity or Hawking's black holes, spawned in the unknowable mind of the Supreme Being?  In the former, God can take a break, walk away from his creation as it hums along.  In the latter, if God takes a break, the universe ceases to be.

I don't know why this particular paragraph jumped out at me tonight.  I have been sitting in my university office, lesson planning, searching for teaching videos.  I have not spoken to or seen another person for close to three hours.  That kind of isolation makes me a little reflective.  Paranoid even.  For example, I just had this vision of God "taking a break" and the world outside my closed office door simply vanishing, like The Nothing eating up The Neverending Story.  When I open the door, I will be confronted by a void.  Emptiness.

Yes, I get in weird states when I work for extended periods of time by myself.  It's productive, but it also fuels the Stephen King lobe of my brain sometimes.  I know that there is still a hallway outside my door.  I just heard a couple of graduate students talking and laughing.  However, the idea of the universe being a machine does not appeal to me; I don't relish the thought of creation running on autopilot.  I prefer a more hand's on vision of the universe--God always attentive, tinkering, creating, throwing a miracle at us every once in a while.

I haven't experienced any miracles today.  Then again, I haven't been around a whole lot of people.  Perhaps, when I go to pick up my daughter from the dance studio, I will encounter something miraculous.  A unicorn crossing the street in front of my car.  A rainbow circling the moon.  A teenage daughter who is actually in a good mood.  It could happen.  Bob Dylan said, " . . . I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come."

Saint Marty just hopes that, in the world to come, teenage daughters make their beds and are nice to their little brothers.

I don't think I've ever been an agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/bob_dylan_4.html

I don't think I've ever been an agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/bob_dylan_4.html

The Nothing is right outside the door