1
LIVING WITH MEANING, TRUTH, AND KINDNESS
We are people hungry for life … [And] all you get
for this enormous effort is more life.
—ROBERT SEDER
THE MESSY MIRACLE we walk through called life is fragile and resilient, ever-present and never guaranteed. Love moves us toward the miracle, while fear moves us toward the mess. And since fear gets its power from not looking, we are called, no matter our circumstance, to enlist the strength of heart to look through our fears. Fear is a mood to be moved through, not a voice to be obeyed. And there is always another direction on the other side of pain and disappointment, if we can take a breath and look around, the way a fish, given the chance, will always swim toward light.
Meaning, truth, and kindness are our constant teachers. They help us live through fear, pain, and disappointment. They are flames that light the heart. Still, we all know that flames burn as well as give off light. In just this way, every inner teacher has a burning quality that we must endure in order to receive their light. We can consider these experiences the growth pains of transformation.
By its very nature, meaning is gathered and enlivened through relationship. It is how we make sense of our experiences, the practice of living as an awakened part in an awakened Whole.
By its nature, truth is gathered and enlivened through deep presence and deep listening. It is the practice of seeing and receiving things-as-they-are, the practice of living with the bareness of being.
And kindness is enlivened and released through the risk of immediate care. It is the practice of allowing compassion to guide us, the practice of uncovering our intimacy with all things.
Together, meaning, truth, and kindness connect everything, forming a lifeline we can hold on to, no matter the storm.
The long conversation of this book is offered as a way to personalize your own relationship with meaning, truth, and kindness—as a way to personalize your very specific practice of living as an awakened part in an awakened Whole, as a way to personalize your individual practice of living with the bareness of being, and as a way to personalize your own evolving practice of being intimate with all things.
Meaning, truth, and kindness are our constant teachers.… They are flames that light the heart.
QUESTIONS TO WALK WITH
In your journal, describe your ongoing conversation between possibility and disappointment. Which has your ear now? How would you describe the larger rhythms of life that include both possibility and disappointment?In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a recent appearance in your life of meaning, truth, or kindness and how this has affected you.
2
THE SPEED OF OUR AGE
WHEN WE BECOME entranced with what is inconsequential, we stop listening to what matters. This is how worry feeds itself, how it fills us with psychic noise.
It’s especially difficult to hear what matters in our modern age. Given our preoccupation with efficiency and productivity, it takes a quiet courage to silence our worry and agitation when we’re always being told that we’re falling short. Being constantly minimized makes us insecure until we swarm like lost and hungry bees for any hive that might soothe our pain of being less—less than perfect, less than beautiful, less than enough, less than what everyone expects of us, inevitably less than our dreams of love and peace.
To counter the speed of our age, we’re asked to open our heart wherever we are. Even though, in the press of the modern world, such softness and openness can be mistaken for being lazy, aimless, and without purpose. But sometimes we need to drift and be aimless in order to disengage the frenzy of civilization and put down our worried agendas, so we can reconnect to the underlying reality that informs everything.
Harder still, we live in an age so obsessed with the new that we’ve been called the “disposable society.” Though it’s often easier to throw something out than repair it, we lose our relationship to the things around us if we discard them without honoring them. When we dispose of things without a thought, we lose the history of objects and tools and the presence they accumulate for moving through our lives. When we miss the story of touch that ordinary things carry, we lose access to the continuity of being that joins us all. The antidote to speed is to hold things and ask for their stories.
In time, not listening to what matters lets us become preoccupied with the noise of the world until the noise of our minds becomes an ingrained pattern. It helps here to understand how the brain creates patterns of what we know and how we move—from the want to quench a physical thirst, to how the arm then lifts and reaches for a cup of water, to the want to be loved and how the heart then opens and reaches for all that is lovable.
Neurons are bits of information stored in the brain. The energy patterns that connect the bits of information are synapses. The neurons and the synapses that connect them form neural networks, which the brain returns to and uses again. Once established, the synapses that connect neurons begin to solidify into the patterned response they form together. This makes fast work of reaching for something to drink the second time, or lifting the groceries when the checkout person hands them to us, or recognizing the beep in the morning as the alarm that our groggy arm needs to turn off. In this way, the brain relies on its neural networks to create and access daily functions stored in our memory, so we don’t have to relearn every little thing, again and again, each time we encounter it.
But the further we get from physical neural networks, the less this works. As we move into psychological and social neural networks, we cease to take in new information and our response to a new situation is often based on old patterns of information—old measurements, if you will. So when a stranger who has exactly what I need to learn has the tone of voice of my mother who wounded me, I might shut her down and walk away. Relied on too heavily, these mental and emotional neural networks, if unchecked, become ruts in the brain. They then form the basis for preconceptions, at the least, and prejudice, at the worst—till we mistake our patterned responses for unshakable truth. As William James said, “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” And as the sculptor Karen French confides, “I’m haunted that my beliefs are just the thoughts I keep thinking.”
We are all prey to this. No one can sidestep it. The stubborn reflexes of our deeply personal neural networks are not about everyone else, but directly about us. How we break these patterns and create new ones has everything to do with what we listen to—whether we experience life directly or simply react to shadows in our own hall of experiential mirrors.
So while considering the speed and noise of our efficient and disposable world, while considering how our brains make habits of our reactions, let’s look at three more ways of not listening: judgment, illusion, and the appetite for more.
Judging others overlays the truth of what is with a screen of our preferred conclusions. For judgment, the kind that debases and elevates, distances us from the experience of others. It keeps us from learning the truth of what’s before us. For example, when I judge a friend who is late as not caring, I may never know that they stopped to help a stranger who fell along the way. In time, the cost of such judgment is that it becomes a clear wall we construct around ourselves to make others think there is no wall, until they go to touch us or we reach out and no one can get through. To see and not be touched drains us of our aliveness—like smelling fruit without ever being able to eat it.
I remember a professor in graduate school who judged all modern poetry as outside the rigor and excellence of the classics. He denigrated all contemporary attempts at expression. When his wife died suddenly, I offered him an anthology of poems about loss and grief filled with some of the most gifted and compassionate voices of our age. Though I could see the face under his face tremble, he coldly thanked me and tossed the book in the garbage. More than being rude, he was sealing himself within his clear wall of judgment, ensuring his deep loneliness in a place no one could reach.
Illusion stems from forcing our preferred understanding of life on all the situations we meet, as we become more interested in sameness than growing. Working to sustain illusion is its own hell. I remember watching a polo match years ago when a horse broke its leg. The far side of the field was where the club members sat. Two field boys with puffy sleeves ran out to hold up a blanket, shielding the club members from the fallen horse, as we on the other side of the field watched someone shoot the horse in the head. Holding up the blanket to shield the club members is a metaphor for the effort to sustain illusion, to pretend that life is other than it is, while in reality the blanket is not shielding anything.
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Nepo
