There are so many things
in my heart following this crazy rollercoaster of a week that began with the
death of my dear father-in-law last Wednesday and continued through his funeral
on Thursday, my return to New York without Joan on Friday, our beautiful
musical Shabbat on Friday evening, the remarkable Shabbat morning service
featuring remarks by Rabbi Carl Perkins (my friend of many, many years), the
Gold Plate Dinner itself on Sunday, Joan’s return to Long Island on Monday, and
the next few days of shiva observance in our home. You could say it’s
been a busy week!
Any one of the above
could turn into a blog post in its own right. But I thought I’d write this
week not about any of it but about all of all, about the experience of knitting
so many discordant themes and diverse obligations and opportunities into a
coherent whole. Because, in the end, isn’t that what life itself is like, only
just not usually quite that concentrated? We dance through the years of
our lives, after all, and, as the music changes to suit the occasion, we dance
differently: slower or faster, in our partner’s arms or merely facing each
other, in step with the other couples on the dance floor or fully on our own
and without reference to anyone else. But, at least for as long as we can, we
keep dancing. When the pace actually gets a bit dizzying, as happened to me
this last week, we finally force ourselves to take note of what we’re doing.
But most of the time, we’re too pre-occupied for that kind of focused
introspection and we just keep on keepin’ on, twirlin’ and swirlin’ to the
music, happy still to be standing, still to be moving, still to be dancing in
the moonlight. (Just for the record,
“Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest was my favorite record of 1972, the
year I left for my junior year of university in France. I knew you’d all want
to know that.) And the music is always there, always audible, always
present—just usually in the background. And then something happens—sometimes a
single event, but other times a strange concatenation of unrelated events—and
suddenly, almost out of the blue, there we are in the moonlight as the world
falls away and we are suddenly on the dance floor all by ourselves.
That’s what this last
week was like.
Since I mentioned one of
my favorite songs from my college years, I’ll also mention one of my favorite
books, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Watts, now forgotten by
most, was a remarkable and well-known figure in his day and a great author. The
child of devout Anglican parents, he eventually forsook Christianity to become
a Buddhist monk, then went on to write any number of books I treasured as a
young person. Of them all, however, The Wisdom of Insecurity is the one
that had the greatest effect on me. He begins by observing that, just like
people, animals also age as they pass through the years. They get older, then
sicker, then weaker. And eventually they die, just as do we all. But the
difference between animals and people is that, whereas we are consumed with
anxiety about all of it (by which I mean: the aging process, the possibility of
illness, the fear of incapacity, the opacity of death itself and our inability
to see past it other than in our mostly made-up fantasies, the whole concept
of growing more frail and less hale as we age, etc.), animals don’t seem to
worry at all about following the natural trajectory of their lives. In fact,
they seem far better at facing it all than any of us is. And so, as they become
less strong and less able, they just move through those stages of their lives
the way they’ve already moved through the earlier ones, possibly even not
noticing the diminution of ability as it devolves upon them, and simply growing
into new version of themselves without seeming to find that concept upsetting
or off-putting. Growth, they appear wordlessly to be saying, may not be always
positive, but it is invariably normal.
And so is the anxiety
growth naturally engenders. In his book, Watts teaches that the insecurity that
the aging process engenders in all of us is not a bad thing and certainly not
something to try to deny or avoid. There is, he wrote, great wisdom in
insecurity, in accepting the fact that we have no idea what the next day will
bring (which idea would presumably be totally foreign to animals), that we
cannot control the universe as we decline any more than we could when we were young
people growing more strong and more capable with each passing year of childhood
and adolescence. And it is from that insecurity that wisdom comes. (Or can come.)
And not just wisdom, Watts wrote, but wisdom born of acceptance, of acquiescence,
of submission to the nature of things, to our place in the universe, to the
Creator who created Creation according to a divine plan that seems to include
inevitable decline as we age and grow less sturdy and increasingly rickety.
Even after all these years, I can still recommend that book to you all. You’ll
like it, I think. But it is troubling too—and precisely because we are so good
at avoiding these truths for most of the time, even perhaps for most of our
lives.
And then you have a week
like I just had. Brought together in a handful of days were the following:
anxiety in the face of impending death, death itself (weirdly captured on
video, since my father-in-law was actually facetiming with Joan when he
breathed his last), eulogy, burial, bereavement, terrible sadness…and then, as
if I wasn’t feeling mortal enough, my return to New York and the ensuing
worship services and speakers and dinners and dancing celebrating my impending
retirement, which is to say the beginning of the next stage, the stage that
contains—not plausibly or possibly, but inevitably—all the things that Alan
Watts writes about in his book. So you can excuse me for feeling a bit fragile
as I contemplate all of this. Fragile and brittle. And yet, also as per Watts,
hopeful and eager to see what the next years bring.
Is that eagerness itself
a kind of denial? You could make that point very cogently! Or was Watts
right that the great reward for facing things as they are is the wisdom that insecurity
engenders as we find the courage to acknowledge the flimsiness of it all, to
face the impermanence of this world we inhabit and, specifically, of our place
in it? I thought he was when I was in college and, now, a half-century later, I
find that I still do.
Like everybody, I’d like to live forever. But I’m not indulging that fantasy these days and, instead, I’m embracing the insecurity and seeking comfort in the ephemeral. Nothing lasts forever. As the great philosopher said, panta rhei, it’s all in flux, all changing constantly, all morphing forward into its own next version, all a work in endless and permanent progress. You can like it or not, but that’s how things are in this world God made and set us all into. So I’m not going to retreat into morose acceptance of my fate or resignation to the inevitability of decline. Instead—and this is the last and best lesson Joan’s dad taught me—I’m going to dance in the moonlight for as long as I can. Like my father-in-law, I have a happy marriage to sustain me and three wonderful children. And another three wonderful children-in-law. I have grandchildren too, unberufen, and watching them grow is and always will be a source of huge pleasure for me. So what am I complaining about? That life is process? I’ve known that since I was in college!
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