Reminders Mild and Harsh

Nothing works as effectively as a reminder of mortality than the abrupt interruption of our habitual way of life. The mild form of that, just at the present, is the failure of our Internet connection; a more telling nudge is a power-failure; in the summer; in winter it’s a much more potent wake-up call. Living in habit’s warm embrace we are protected from the awareness of our current quandary: we exist in what, for humans, is an alien environment. Then there are the serious events: blood in the urine, the tight band across the chest. The world seems to stop. Everything is in the air.

Curious business, habit. If the upheavals last long enough, we get used to them. New habits form. If the ailments do not kills us, we learn to limp or to take our medications; routine visits to the doctors, to the clinics become…routine. The lens gets adjusted; we forget how blurred our vision has become. We also find it easy to recall adaptive habits. After the fourth or fifth recurrence of something unpleasant, we just dust off learned routines and resume them—until the lights are back on again or that pain across the chest gradually diminishes.

At its deepest levels, organic life seeks equilibrium—a word that nicely approximates the feeling we have when we are just living our habits. It was Freud, I think (and I cannot check this, what with the Internet down), who spoke about the death instinct in man, derived from the fact that organic life has a secret wish to reach, again, that state of total equilibrium present in inorganic matter. Matter has neither wants nor wishes. But the death instinct may also signal something else—the wish to be entirely free of matter which, stirred up by energy, is ever in motion and ever undergoing change. Plato well knew this. The soul has no parts hence cannot decay.

An examination of this situation suggests a paradoxical solution to the ever-looming dread of unwished-for change. A genuinely awaked person knows that one must be detached from all of that—“all of that” being precisely what we call “life” here. He or she should, like a good Scout, be semper paratus for anything, attached to nothing. But a vast gulf separates knowing from being. Being attached to our daily life is virtually unavoidable. Practicing detachment is a good thing—until, chuckle, it becomes habitual. In which case, sure enough, it no longer works.

All this, to be sure, will come to an end. In the meantime, when we fall, we must promptly get up again, brush off, grit our teeth, and soldier on. And, paradoxically again, the reminders, mild or harsh, are actually a blessing. They are reminders. Your work on earth is still not done.

Worn Like a Habit

The world is full of mysteries we barely even notice. Habit is the enemy of wonder. It saves us effort in every way and in that sense is a great blessing. At the same time wonder requires effort. It arises when something new floats into view and our habitual modes of reaction don’t instantly classify it into the known category and—for that very reason—nothing to spend time and effort on. We spend time and effort on what matters, and what matters is our comfort, physical first and then the more subtle kind. Least meriting sustained application are curiosities defying our efforts to understand them. Not surprisingly, therefore, neither the starry skies, nor a death in our circle, never mind puzzles in nature touch more than the margins of attention. In all three cases a widespread collective habit helps us escape the effort to think about the matter very long. There’s shopping to be done or the hamburgers need turning on the grill, or we roll our eyes a little and we think: “Well, science probably has an explanation.” Science usually does; but in pursuing that explanation  (it takes effort) we discover that science has its habits too and obeys the indolence that habit produces (its collateral damage) to frame answers in ways that in turn obey long-standing fashions.

The curious conclusion I reach is that real learning appears to demand a surplus of some kind of energy—one reason why in all spiritual paths on offer people are urged to minimize their attachments to the world, that word understood in one sense, so that they can really understand it, in another sense, at the core.