“Ordinarily, the inquiry is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a more pertinent question which I overheard one of my auditors put to another one – ‘What does he lecture for?’ It made me quake in my shoes.”
–Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle”
“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
–Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”
Reflecting on the passing away of another old year and the start of another new one, I find myself once again thinking about endings and beginnings, about thresholds and liminal spaces, about resolutions and change, and about all the stories we tell ourselves about time – about all that’s past and all that’s yet to come.
There’s a passage from the journals of Søren Kierkegaard that I first heard many years ago:
“It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”
Or, as it’s often paraphrased, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” I’ve always taken the line to mean that, although understanding typically only comes with reflection, the actual living of a life involves a constant series of forays and advances into the unknowable future. The message seemed to be that, however imperfect our knowing, we must move forward in faith, walking “not by sight” but by some higher faculty that guides and supports us through all of life’s twists and turns.
I still hold that basic sense of it – that we often have to move forward despite our uncertainty regarding where our present choices and actions might lead us. We can’t let the uncertainty of our future keep us from acting now – today.
But these days I wonder even if Kierkegaard’s basic assurance that life can “be understood backwards” isn’t something of a useful fiction, one that might reassure us and give us hope, but which does little to lead towards any actual development of our understanding. It’s nice to think – like the old song says – that “we’ll understand it all by and by,” but what if the truth of the matter is that we must forever “walk by faith and not by sight” and therefore learn to be content to dwell always somewhere within a great cloud of unknowing?
As the new year dawns, I’m tempted, as always, to set some lofty aspirations. And I’m certainly not against a few well-chosen goals to help guide you on your own journey, wherever you think you might be headed over the coming year. But I’ve also been reflecting recently on the words of Mary Oliver quoted above (and again just below), from her poem “Sometimes.”
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
I love this stanza. It’s a perfect lyrical encapsulation of the idea of being present – of really showing up, moment by moment, for our own lives.
As much as we want to be actors out in the world, as much as we want to leave our mark on things and shape the course of human events – both large and small – sometimes part of being human is just standing witness to the extraordinary spectacle unfolding all around us at every single instant.
There are so many miracles to be found in even the simplest of moments. In Oliver’s words, we’re here to “pay attention” and “be astonished” by them as much as we are here to do anything about them or to accomplish anything at all. We are, first and foremost, human beings, and we might do well to recall sometimes that our “being” is distinct from – and prior to – our “doing.”
To pay attention – and then to be willing and able to be astonished – seems like it has very little to do with either understanding the past or striking out boldly in the direction of the future. Instead, they’re both basically rooted in the present – in this moment, right here and right now – which might be the only place or time we really have.
Sometimes in life we get so caught up trying to make sense of what’s been and what will be that we lose our grip on reality — which is just to say, the present moment.
Reflecting on this idea brings to mind another passage jotted down after reading it long ago – found like a clue to a puzzle I hadn’t even begun solving at the time. It’s from a lecture given by Alan Watts, and it seems to touch on a similar theme.
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.”
Taken together, Watts’ observation and Oliver’s “instructions” form a powerful tonic to our deep-seated desire to understand the past and master the future. The final line of the stanza from Oliver’s poem – the simple phrase “Tell about it” – is more mysterious still. Therein lies the challenge and the admonition. Therein lies the dangerous work of poets and prophets and sages and seers the whole world round.
“Tell about it.”
We’re all afraid, on some level or another, that what we have to contribute isn’t what the world really needs, that what we have to say is too trite or unimportant to be of any real worth or efficacy. What’s worse, we worry that the real truth of what we have to say will never find its way out, that we will never summon the courage needed to “tell about it” in any way that really matters.
But, as much as we long for certainty, or to understand the universe’s long-game, it may never be ours to know. And as soon as we get too lost in worrying over it, we start to lose the thread in the fabric – to lose the present moment. I suspect that it’s at that instant – the instant when we get lost in our own anxieties about the passage of time and what we must do about that passage – that so much of our feverish planning and worrying (and goal-setting and New Year’s resolution making) begins.
The present moment is our anchor to what lies out somewhere beyond time as we now understand it. In “The Screwtape Letters” – composed in the voice of an elder demon writing to his apprentice nephew about God’s hope for humanity and how best to thwart that hope – C.S. Lewis puts it like this:
“[God] therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
So another year ends and another year begins. And here I stand, like always, trying to tell the story as it unfolds before me.
I’ll try, for a time at least, to quell my innate rush towards all that incessant doing and making and grasping, to quiet my persistent planning and my worrying about the future and my wondering about the past. And I’ll try to be on the lookout for the miracles and the mysteries – both large and small – present in each passing moment. Most of all, I guess, I’ll try not to dull my sense of astonishment at the sight of everything I see.
We’re each trying to tell the story – you and me and everyone we meet – or at least to tell our part of the story. We tell it into the light, at least so long as we have it. And we tell it into the darkness, too – our stories and songs like nautical soundings by which we slowly come to comprehend the shape of the place where we stand, to recognize our own hopes and joys and fears, and to see them reflected also in the faces of those all around us
The threads of that larger story are woven together, across all of time and space, a tapestry enlivening and gladdening our lives and then vanishing at the edge of our perception – at the frontiers of our knowing – into mysteries that are still too beautiful to comprehend.
Photo Credit: Nick Welch on Unsplash
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