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Ha! That got your attention, right? But, no, I am not in the midst of a psychotic break. I do realize that it is my older daughter who will confront that milestone in a couple of years. But in an email and phone conversation with a dear friend who I consider my “non-biological daughter” I have come to realize that there are those among us here on The Wall for whom 40 seems both old, and just a touch scary.
Consider this an post open letter of comfort to them and a gentle reminder for those of us for whom forty is but a shifting memory fading into a distant past:
First, Grasshopper, with luck, you too will come to see forty as a faded photograph whose “certainty” was revised time and time again, passing through many decades to finally arrive at the realization that the best we can hope for is to discern a set of guiding principles that help us through the ever-evolving paths of wonder that come to define our unique life and the mystery of existence.
I have found it helpful to cobble those principles into a kind of aphorism that I confront on a regular basis - the ubiquitous “email sig.” Here in the early years of the 21st century, we all have one. Well, most of us do, and if you are reading this you most likely among the “sigged.” At the very least you see mine, the “signature” that gets tacked to the end of each email telling you that another edition of Schrag Wall has arrived. Too often these signatures devolve into ”phatic” communication; a social ritual devoid of any real meaning. For example, we say “Hi there. How’s it going?” expecting to hear “Fine, and you?” To which we will reply “Fine” as we head into Starbucks for our morning jolt of caffeine. We certainly don’t expect a real dissertation on the state of their home life, professional challenges, or god forbid, their philosophy of life.
Yet, often at some time or another - certainly in our personal, as opposed to our professional email - we do give serious consideration to the pithy assertion that accompanies our name on each message that we send whirling off into cyberspace. At one time I used a quote from Thoreau, a writer whose work I admire. But that has been so long ago that I no longer remember exactly which of his delightful insights I borrowed.
For the last decade or so I have used a “sig” of my own composition that serves as much as a personal reminder of my guiding principles as it is a gentle suggestion to the recipient. As I said before, you see it at the end of each email that sends you the link for this blog. But since it is always the link and not the sig that is foregrounded, I thought I would take this opportunity to elevate what is usually “the end” of a message to a place of more prominence and talk about it a little, especially for those of you for whom the big “4-0” looms large and potentially disconcerting.
First, the “sig” itself:
“Who we are is a quality of the moment. What we have done in the past cannot be undone, and what we have promised for the future remains but a promise. So live each moment in the awareness that it defines you.”
Three sentences. I think I will start by dissecting the middle one: "What we have done in the past cannot be undone, and what we have promised for the future remains but a promise.” The first phrase is an affirmation of the notion that life has no rewind button. We cannot go back and undo that which we have done in the past. It is vital to accept that frustrating reality. The foolish, and sometimes hurtful, things I did 20, 30, 40, - hell, even 50 or 60 years ago, have a way of dive-bombing my consciousness as I pull on my socks or rummage along down the frozen food aisle at the grocery store. Far too often the offended party has left my life, either figuratively or literally, making any realistic attempt at rapprochement both impossible and meaningless. There is no rewind button. Similarly, regarding those who have wounded you, unfairly accused you of nefarious behavior or motIvations; those realities live only in the rear view mirror of your life. Ignore them. The harm lies in letting the anger remain in your heart. So regarding both types of discordances, the lesson is simple: Let them go but - Don’t. Do. That. Again.
Turning to those promises about the future; there is an old Yiddish saying that roughly translates to “Man plans and God laughs.” Neither that, nor the phrase in my sig “what we have promised in the future remains but a promise” should be read as tacit permission to wander through life as a feckless bumpkin whistling tunes from old Disney movies. It suggests that rather than seeing the future as some laser straight, predictable, pathway - point A to point B, zip zip - we should envision it as a fireworks display. Point A to possible points B, C, D, . . . Z. Oh, and look over there! Points AA, BB, CC, etc. You get the idea, to see only one path forward comes close to guaranteeing that you will miss a turn somewhere in the enchanted forest that is our future.
The two phrases of that middle sentence serve as a bridge between the first and third sentences: “Who we are is a quality of the moment,” and “So live each moment in the awareness that it defines you.”
And what does that mean? Increasing, for me for the past couple of decades - a realization that certainly eluded me in those decades preceding 40 - it means trying to make sure that belief and behavior are firmly linked. I can recall far too many instances in “my younger days” when I could passionately articulate a personal, social or political belief and yet somehow manage to behave in ways that were, if not clearly contrary to those assertions, certainly sailed close to the wind.
The tricky part of keeping belief and behavior synchronized is, of course, clarifying just what it is that you do believe. And this is where passing the big 4-0 is a milestone devoutly to be wished. Having spent most of my life in classrooms packed with twenty-somethings, I have no doubts regarding the passion of their beliefs in a variety of arenas. But, having maintained contact with a goodly number of them, I am equally assured that those positions do a fair amount of shifting as life unfolds before them. It is a phenomenon not absent from my own history.
However, I can say that the further I get from forty, the shifts in the palette of my beliefs become less dramatic, and the relationship between my beliefs and my behavior becomes more consistent. These days I do my best to behave in ways that manifest the four major tenets of Distilled Harmony, the personal philosophy that has come to guide my life. And to remind us all, those tenets are, in order of salience: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. The tenets, while increasing consistent, are not carved in stone. Let me briefly share, or reaffirm, some current capstone concepts from each.
Foster Harmony - This tenet is first because it is both most important and most difficult. It asks us to be kind and gentle to those with whom we share the planet and our lives. Often the difficulty arises from the fact that “kind and gentle” can look very different through different eyes and lenses. It is only natural to see our own behavior as “kind and gentle” and the behavior of others as sometimes less so. The objective is to keep on trying to reduce the distance between those varying perspectives.
Enable Beauty - Whenever you can. I read a fascinating article recently about examples in nature where the manifestation of beauty held no Darwinian advantage. The beauty did not seduce a mate, or lure a pollinator. It did not attract prey, or bestow advantage upon your progeny. Beauty seemed to be its own endstate, needing no other reason to exist. Being beautiful was enough. I think as we shape our lives, our homes, our walls, our offices, and our environment we should keep that notion in mind. Sometimes just being beautiful, or creating beauty, is enough.
Distill Complexity - There is a sardonic saying in the academic world: If you cannot bowl them over with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. It is an attitude that spreads far beyond the ivory tower. Read any legal agreement you sign. Leaf through the program of a meeting of a professional association. Listen closely to the swiftly read tag at the end of any pharmaceutical product advertised on TV. There may well be brilliance in there somewhere, but it is often hidden beneath a few tons of “baffles.” Einstein is said to have asserted that if you could not explain a concept clearly to a six-year old then you yourself did not fully understand the idea. We need constantly to try to strip the fluff away from both our beliefs and our behavior. As stated above in the second tenet, art is to be profoundly desired. The correllary “artifice is to be avoided at all costs,” is equally germane. We need to become simplistic, childlike, without becoming childish. For a delightfully uncluttered presentation of this tenet I strongly recommend the children’s book Simple Pictures are Best by Nancy Willard, illustrations by Tomis dePaola.
Oppose Harm - Edmund Burke, reknowned Irish political theorist and philosopher, warned us that “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” A lovely bit of distilled complexity. To gild the lily just a touch, when fostering harmony, enabling beauty and distilling complexity fail to thwart the excesses of individuals, governments or corporations we must actively oppose them. To affirm the unique glory of our nation we need to more clearly recall that the central documents and the better history of the Republic assert that we muster this opposition in respectful public debate, in non-violent protest, in the court of law, or at the ballot box. When we fail in this regard we become a distorted funhouse mirror reflection of that which we seek to oppose.
So Grasshopper, as you can see, manifesting those four tenets to the best of your ability - even figuring out just what the four tenets mean to you individually - is certainly too much to accomplish in the blink of a 4 decade eye. Hence, as you blow out that 40-candle conflagration threatening to melt your cake, whisper a little prayer that you will have at least four more decades ahead of you to get the wonderful challenges of that job done.
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