Friday, September 11, 2009

My Art of Living II



ON GRATITUDE (7)

I have been struck by a feature of aging that seems to me one of its great challenges: learning to cope with loss. Once you enter on the ‘downslide’ of your lifetime, assuming – as you now realize is presumptuous – that it will stretch out fourscore or more (or whatever may conform to the average of your ancestors), the confrontation with death and loss becomes a daily feature of the art of living. On the upside of life, the future looms open before you, all passed opportunities can be reclaimed, all injuries healed, all powers realized, and you are chiefly occupied with meeting the complex set of challenges you have invested yourself in, above all work (career) and love (family, friends).

But on the downside, things change. You begin to come to grips with the fact that every choice entails options not taken, every wound leaves scars that may not ever fully heal, and any loss, however seemingly transient, can be forever. Grief hits you as loved ones begin to fade into the darkness of minds locked now in old habits, and then are gone; children destroy or waste opportunities and narrow life’s options, yet still struggle on; vagueness and distraction troubles powers you once had to see and act; relationships lose their magic, to say nothing of their constancy; time itself is corroded by an element of desperation; hope seems a dubious gift.

The most common reaction to all this is anger. A deep, choking anger that spills out occasionally toward enemies and friends, a frustration at not being able to do as you pride yourself in doing, a bitterness that spews venom, as if harshness of thought and word and deed were enough to re-establish your strength, your ‘amounting to something’ in a world you feel slipping between your fingers.

But this, too, changes, if the old chestnut of wisdom through suffering begins to grow inside and shape a new form. A clearer sense of the division of what is in and out of your control, of the value of moral effort and attention to the possibilities of the moment, of the vagaries and mistakes you have made in estimating future costs and harms, of the joy that can be lived if you respect the present and what it offers, as opposed to what it might lack or a future that will hardly be as good or bad as you hoped or feared. I do not doubt that ambition must to some extent be realized, to let go of other ambitions that were never more than dreams, nor that desire never ceases to prick the mind and heart with fancies that may not and perhaps should not be made real.

If the turn of mind we have been considering means anything at all, it engages our reason with the task of learning its own limits, enables us to see hope as related to, rather than excluded by, the deep contingency of our being, and from that to gratitude for what and who we have and know, in our relations and our days. The flights of freedom Hadot speaks of need not be to “the view from above,” the presumption of universal reason; they can also be to “the view from down here,” in all its particularity and transience. To “seize the day” we must embrace the fact that it is just this day we can seize, not any other.

The ancient philosophers inspire our minds with ideals of reason and grace, which I believe we may use, with some reserve, to form a more reasonable, more self-sufficient and more compassionate attitude toward others and toward ourselves. The “spiritual exercises” Hadot would have us note and practice point to a life of reason, but I now see that life including accepting and loving myself with a less perfect, but also less coercive reason than I employed before, when I was driven by the “transcendental humors” Montaigne advises us to shed.

This transformation gave way to the release, the laughter I discovered, as I realized things were not as bad as I feared, that the moment contained much of value, and that I could embrace it now more fully, because unburdened by false dreams or fears. Even if I cannot play the game as strongly as I might have in the past, I play it more joyfully, more for the game itself and not a proof of virtue and self-worth, more with the other as a player, too, not in a higher or lower role. My mask of tragedy, anger, grief and loss has been covered by one of comedy, laughter, hope and joy, and I have regained the world as it is, as it gives itself to me in the kairos (opportunity) of my time.

1 comment:

  1. The the next question is: Is it possible to take the attitude of those past mid-life without necessarily being there? There are indeed great potential joys in becoming immersed in the moment, and while this mindset is almost certainly easier to acquire as the total number of available moments left in life presumably dwindles, few philosophers seem to insist that this be the case. Indeed, it seems difficult for young adults to accomplish association with the immediate, but I suspect that is because they have not yet acquired the taste for it--who would, really, when the great accomplishments of life still seem to lurk in an uncertain but encouraging future?

    But perhaps this perspective is simply the product of my age: a strange midpoint where I don't yet think toward the end but have already conceded many of the dreams of the beginning, in a setting where I am surrounded daily by much younger adults. And in such a place, it is difficult not to wonder whether surrendering the big visions of tomorrow for a paradoxically sober carpe diem is a wise concession to reality or a jaded abandonment of that which colors life with hope.

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