Word of the Week- 74

"Arthur and the Triplets Waiting for a Letter from the Mailman."  (from the Babar stories)

Word of the Week:  WAIT

Patience, more a virtue than ever.  The willingness to wait for whatever is desired but not yet here seems to appeal to very few.  We wait for so much.  Mostly I feel as though I wait for myself.

I wait for guidance, for information, for clarity.  I've stopped hurrying.  I allow matters to unfold in quiet and calm, if possible.  If my inner wisdom is not a shrieking, "DO IT NOW, " I will do it later.  There was an article this week - somewhere - about procrastination not being only the refuge of slackers and layabouts.  The article suggested there was wisdom at work when decisions were postponed, immediate action deferred.

(From the album, "The 2,000 Year Old Man" by Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks)

Carl: Sir, could you give us the secret of your longevity?

Mel: Well, the major thing, the major thing is that I never, ever 
touch fried food. I don't eat it, I wouldn't look at it, and I 

don't touch it. And I never run for a bus. There'll always be 

another. Even if you're late for work, you know, I never run 

for a bus. I never ran. I just strolled, jaunty-jolly, walking 

to the bus stop.

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It seems the popularly-held belief is that we miss so much by delaying, delaying anything.  I don't understand how this can be a universal truth.  Since we have no way of knowing what even the next moment holds, how can we be certain that not taking the trip, not seeing the movie, not rushing out in pursuit of 12 seemingly essential activities will cause us lifelong regret.  I have no "bucket list" and the name itself gives me hives.  We can be led astray by our wants, just as we can be inspired by them.

I am not one of the universe's bold children, I never have been.  Yes, I've done rash and foolish things, been incautious in dangerous ways.  The luck of fools or an army of guardian angels.  Haste is not my ally.  Answers DO come, or if they don't I assume there is no answer.  Rilke's* urging that we live the questions is my norm.  At times it seems to be only questions held loosely together by gravity.  Wait, is what I interpret him saying.  Wait.

* “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Word of the Week - 16

Art, The Whale, by Terry Fan, works found here.

Word of the Week:  UNSEEN

In his short story, "The Night the Bed Fell on Father," James Thurber wrote of a character who piled her belongings outside the bedroom door at night with instructions that any burglars take what they wanted and not use their chloroform on her.  We are fragile vessels on endless, unknowable seas taking what precautions we can and hoping for the best.  Such a grain, a particle of what exists falls within our scope, so much is unseen.

On a solo Alaskan hunting trip in what I imagine to be a vast snowy wasteland, my uncle Ray was, after a number of days, picked up as had been arranged.  When the pilot landed, he told Ray that he could see from the air what Ray could not have known: that he was being stalked by a polar bear.  This may be family myth, I may have misremembered all or part of it, but the whale painting called it to mind.

I experience life as an act of faith, an unspooling continuum in which what we must know next somehow finds us, steps forward, states its name.  So much of the unseen is the good, which may leave itself like notes written in a spidery and nearly illegible hand tucked under a corner of the doormat.  A whiff of night-blooming jasmine, possibly imagined for the plant is no longer there, drifting through the second floor window.  Our sight is enhanced by distance of time and space.  I've heard often in 12-step meetings, "More will be revealed."  And it will, it is.  Meanwhile, unless we wish to suffer needlessly, we operate as advised by Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Note to self: befriend the unseen.  Think of ways in which to do this.