The Consistency of Harmony

. 

(An observation.  Before I retired there was a bit of a kerfluffle going on at the University about “trigger warnings.” These were proposed additions to course materials to “warn” students that they might encounter content that could - well, I was never sure what we were supposed to warn them about. Maybe new information? Big words? Anyhow, this a “lengthy warning.” That means go pop some corn or grab some chips or other munchies and a beverage of your choice, ‘cause this one gets a bit wordy. Can you imagine?)

Just a quick refresher; Distilled Harmony is a lifestyle philosophy driven by four basic tenets. They are, in order of primacy: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty; Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. The belief is that behaving in accordance with these four tenets we come ever closer to sharing the central Harmony that organizes existence.

I was doing a little time-traveling on my walk this morning, courtesy of the Pandora Hits of the Sixties channel. That put me back at the end of high school, and the beginning of my college career. It was, in some ways, a visit with parts of my life that had been "out of sight, out of mind" for more than half a century. Images of faces and places presented themselves with sufficient clarity to elicit chuckles, sighs and groans as I followed my younger self through the triumphs and disasters of those musically enabled moments.

OK, we are talking about a significant span of years, but how could I have been so many different people during those times? Sometimes a total jerk, at other times a relatively insightful young man, often somewhere in between. A span of identities with different hopes, different dreams, different plans, different certainties, different doubts. Different everything it seemed. Until I stopped walking, took off my headphones, and sat down and realized that in each of my different selves there was a least a kernel of the older guy who eventually came to cherish harmony. And recognizing that kernel, sometimes just a fragment of an identity that cherished harmony, started me thinking about the many faces of harmony.

Harmony is a pretty broad brush with which to paint a life.  Distilled Harmony presumes to contain all four tenets, and does in many ways, but I find it a good idea to remind myself that all four tenets point to creating, finding, and maintaining harmony. This is particularly important when we realize that the path to harmony rarely runs straight, rarely manifests itself in a consistent guise. Rather we wrap various shifting realities around the relatively constant core of our harmonic self.

So through much of the 60s I was this confident youngster who knew the world would soon recognize that he was God's gift to American musical theater and he would live out life as a modest celebrity with a compliant and supportive woman at this side. So, OK, sometimes each of our various identities gets it a little wrong.

But that kid - aka myself at that age - also got some of it right.  Musical theater in the 60s was a pretty joyful place: The Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie [full disclosure - I played Birdie in High School :-)], Hello Dolly, Man of La Mancha. Bright lights, happy dancers, romance, applause, curtain calls - aka Harmony. The fact that the world failed to recognize his/my integral place in that world wasn't really our fault. For a while, in my more grandiose moments I would believe myself to have been the most talented performer to graduate from Springfield North High School. And then John Legend came along, sigh. So first there's John and then me, and, truth be told, probably a host of equally, if not more talented, kids between the two of us.

But looking back on my recent musically induced magical mystery tour, I think that even then I was beginning to recognize that the path to harmony was shaped by two insights; first, that harmony and love are synonymous concepts; and second, they both can find reciprocity in different places and people.

This might be a good place to remind us, and for some of you disclose for the first time, that The Schrag Wall came into being back in 2008. I had just published, The God Chord, String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart.  I had managed the construction of that work by posting notecards of “to be included” items on the wall behind my computer desk. Well, the book was completed but related ideas kept coming. That reality, and the fact that my wall was completely obscured by notecards, gave birth to this online blog.

It is in a way comforting that the intervening 13 years of Schrag Wall retain many of the central notions of The God Chord. (If you would like a copy of that work, drop me a note at robert.schrag@gmail.com) and I’ll shoot a digital copy out to you.) Perhaps most significant is the idea that our most central “self” can be thought of as our personal chord - an evolving compilation of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, values and experiences that are, ideally, moving us closer and closer to the constantly observable and knowable Harmony that underlies the universe. Hence - Distilled Harmony.

Again, perhaps inspired by Pandora’s Hits of the Sixties, I have been visited, during naps, nights, and dozing, by reflections, visual flashes and recollections of moments, people and experiences - individual “notes” if you will -  that struck particularly close to, and have remained tightly entwined with, what I believe are the central notes of my own chord.

First there is Jimmy.  During the summers of 1966 and 1967, I worked as a volunteer/counselor at Clearwater Ranch in Philo, California. The ranch was a permanent treatment center for “emotional disturbed” children. I’m sure those descriptors have been changed over the past 50 years, but essentially the ranch was where the sent kids in “the system” that no one else wanted. I worked - basically babysat - a group of the youngest. A group I came to think of my “itsy-bitsy-skitsies.” Jimmy was one of those kids. He was a little tow-haired five-year-old with huge blue eyes that would just melt your heart. He sort of became my shadow.  Nights were chilly in Northern California, and on particularly cool nights Jimmy would say, “Bob, I’m cold!” which was our private speak for “Give me your sweater.”  And I would hand over my yellow sweater.

There was a female counselor about my age who also had a special relationship with Jimmy. She and I were friends, but had no special feelings for one and other. Yet we seriously, well as seriously as two 17-year-olds could manage, discussed getting married so we could adopt Jimmy and take him away from the ranch. Remember this was California in the 60’s when everything seemed possible! Still, after many long discussions with each other, and two sets of nonplussed parents, we realized that without jobs, education, incomes, etc., we would be doing Jimmy no favor by essentially kidnapping him from the State of California. So at the end of the summer I had to say goodbye to Jimmy as I stepped into the van to take me down to San Francisco to begin my trip back to my new life at Kalamazoo College. It can also be hot in Northern California, and this was a scorcher. I hugged Jimmy goodbye.

He looked up at me. “Bob, I’m cold.” I dug into my knapsack and surrendered the sweater. Jimmy struggled into it, using the floppy sleeves to wipe his eyes.

So the chord “love can break your heart, but that is better than turning your back on love” got filed away in my “central Harmony chord.” Still there, still functioning.

And then there as the night at the outdoor stage at NCMA - North Carolina Museum of Art. We were listening to an excellent Beatles cover band, either Fabfest or Beatlesque, I forget, it was a long time ago, probably a dozen years. Anyhow, the weather was perfect, humidity under 30%, a rarity for Raleigh, temperature maybe 75. No clouds, lots of stars. Perhaps a dozen local breweries had set up stalls around the upper perimeter of the seating area and we had sampled their wares. As the band swung into “All You Need is Love,” I resisted the possibly beverage induced urge to jump up and holler “Tell it like it is, brother!” Instead I reflected on the fact that the wonderful chords that unite to define our central Harmony can pop up in a variety of venues - you need not travel far nor spend a fortune. This was one such moment. If the asteroid had taken that moment to plop down on Raleigh, I would have gone out with a smile. The trick is not so much to seek these unique moments out, but rather to recognize and acknowledge them when you are lucky enough to find yourself in their presence.

And then, of course, most importantly, there are the people who share your life, and the notes and chords they contribute.  One of the songs Pandora sprung on me was Gale Garnett’s “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.” Not actually a one-hit wonder, but pretty close. Back in the mid 1960s, when the tune was enjoying its brief burst of popularity, and I was a junior or senior in high school falling in and out of love with stunning regularity, I had always found this lyric weird:

“I will never love you,

The cost of love’s too dear.

But though I’ll never love you,

I’ll stay with you one year.

And we can sing in the sunshine.”

"How strange," thought my 1960-ish self, who had been raised on adventure/romance novels from the early 1900s, top 40 tunes, and Broadway musicals, all of which touted the “now and forever” brand of love. What place does the lyric “I will never love you” have in a love song? And even more so, an expiration date, “I’ll stay with you one year.”  Really? Thanks so much!

My 21st century self, not surprisingly, has a rather different take on the whole question of loving the people in your life.

Love/Harmony is always a condition of the moment. It cannot be delayed, and rarely resuscitated. Hence, we must always seek to behave according to the dictates of each version or variation of the central Harmonic chord. Yet, we are all prone to error. We sometimes behave in ways that are dissonant to that central chord, as sometimes do the people that we love. So Harmony also favors forgiveness, of others and of ourselves. But forgiveness should not translate to self-deception. Forgiving constant deviations from the central chord, both in ourselves and in those we love, is destructive. Sometimes, as Ms. Garnett perhaps overstates, “The cost of love’s too dear." The tricky part - in the long run - is reconciling the insights shot from the hip of our youthful selves with our current, more thoughtful and evolving understanding of manifesting loving harmony in our relationships with the vital others in our lives.

The most helpful insight perhaps is the one contained in the previous paragraph. Our central chord is of the moment, and is based in self-aware, forgiving, openness.  When interacting with the loved ones in our life, we should try to meet each moment of each day, each interaction - or lack thereof - in the hope of finding new, or confirming, evidence of our enduring coherence with the universal Harmony of existence.

.