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Hello Friend,
I hope you are doing well. It seems so many of us are feeling overburdened, burned out, or struggling this time of year.
Last night I went out for dinner with another friend, and he too is feeling like this is a heavy month. Maybe February will feel lighter – I never really got on board with the premise of the unbearable lightness of being. Too much weight has always been the part I fear – I love flying. It is the crushing crash of responsibility and routine I find insufferable.
I often equate it to surfing (I am a terrible surfer) – you will never become perfect at catching the best waves. With experience, you manage to catch more meaningful waves, and ride them longer – but it is one of the few deep injustices of the universe that the stuff we seem to find most meaningful in life is not the day-to-day, but the exceptional.
Now I am a windsurfer, and I am getting better at embracing the putting-on of the wetsuit, the loading and unloading of the board and gear, the weather forecasting and the time spent setting up and thrashing. It all adds meaning to the experience of flying across wave tops at 20 miles per hour, as if in a dream. But a lot of preparation leads up to the peak experiences.
A born-again friend of mine says she finds God in everything she does. His eternal light is effectively unconditional love, and when you accept his love, you cannot help but love him in return. As a result, doing the dishes and cleaning the house is an act of love. I’ve begun adopting this perspective.
It makes sense. Why not find meaning in everything? You must be doing it for a reason anyway.
Last night, over pizza and Narraganset beer. In addition to rambling very much with my nostalgic stories about motorcycle road-tripping around the country in 2008, I brought up this idea of measurement of one’s life, and of populations.
Intellectual blasphemer I am, I didn’t even think of Prufrock then – “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”. I am realizing now how biblical that poem is:
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens
This idea of how we measure ourselves…
“…if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.” – PKD
The idea in Dick’s book is that we have abdicated our responsibility to machines. The machines decide our worth. In Prufrock’s poem, it is social pressure – the mermaids aren’t what kill him, society isn’t what kills him, but rather the combination of the two. In other words, his heart and dreams cannot coexist with reality.
But I am distracting myself. I really must be getting on to other things. Maybe next time I’ll ‘dive’ deeper into the “chambers of the sea” and we can talk together you and I.
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
I am reading Infinite Powers, Strogatz’s book. When you combine that with How To Measure Anything and with The Theory That Would Not Die, you end up faced with a compelling argument that a creative mind really can measure anything.
My friend last night bristled and said “I do not like that.” I get it. Yet it gives me some sort of peace of mind, that there’s an order to the universe, that we can learn some secrets yet, that we can get better, bit-by-bit, at surfing the waves. Even coffee spoons have a cosmic purpose.