All or Nothing at All

Rabbi Rami Shapiro asked Father Thomas Keating, “How are you preparing for death?” Father Keating replied, “The same way I’ve lived my life: by emptying myself of Thomas moment to moment.”

“And where do you imagine you’ll go when you die?” “When there is no you, there’s nowhere for you to go.”

This kenosis, or self-emptying, whispers to me from a distance, but it speaks in tongues. It hovers at the end of the road, a shadowy presence, the cloud of unknowing. I’m trying to reconcile it with the impulse to double down, to become more and more myself, forsaking all attempts to become someone else. Then I have the intuition that these two tangos, stepping into the greater Susie and letting go of her like a candy wrapper on a windy New York street, are really the same dance. I feel a push-pull between these two versions of my future and a lostness regarding how to inhabit a vibration where the two join hands. I have moved to Minnesota. Minnie Mouse has wandered into a Rembrandt, causing her great bewilderment and leaving her with more questions than answers. As it should be.

It began with a Marie Kondo grand gesture of cleaning out the house in the Berkshires. It wasn’t an especially large house and relative to other people I know, we didn’t have that much stuff. Still, it involved a category four storm of memory-unearthing, decision-making, and garbage-hauling of bags of junk to the dump. Now I find myself in an orderly condo with minimalist decor. Every piece of art on the wall is there for a reason. I am starting from scratch except for the boxes of family photographs in the extra-bedroom closet that cling to me like dog hair. They will not let me go. But I guess it’s just as well that I have two-dimensional versions of my family and friends, many already dead, since for the most part in Minnesota nobody knows me. This is as good a place as any to embark on the self-emptying process.

Photo by Andy Li on Unsplash

I’m reminded of the hasidic story that you may remember. Sorry if I’m repeating myself, but I can’t get enough of this story. A man is wearing a jacket with a pocket on each side. In one pocket is a scrap of paper that says, “You are the apple of God’s eye.” In the other pocket is a scrap of paper that says, “You are nothing but a speck of dust.” I’ve been thinking about this story for decades and have often considered its utility. If you’re feeling worthless because your turkey was dry and tasteless, all you have to do is grab the scrap that talks about apples which maybe you forgot to put in the stuffing. If you’re feeling all puffed up because someone commented that you don’t look seventy-seven, you can bring out the piece of paper that says you’re nothing but dust since, let’s face it, that’s where you’re headed. My idea has always been that the two little notes serve as corrections for one another. You can’t go off the deep end altogether if you maintain a balance between the two messages.

More recently as I try to decide whether to become more or less myself, I’m getting a buzz from somewhere that says beyond an attempt at balance, there is no distinction between All and Nothing. Rabbi Rami tells another story. There is a rope with two knots tied in it. Both knots are simply rope, nothing but rope. Still, they may be somewhat different from one another….looser, tighter, larger, smaller. If I think of myself as one knot and the other as, for example, my mother, when I untie her she’s gone. She was nothing but rope and the rope remains, but she is gone. She has been absorbed into the rope, the All. If I am nothing, if I am empty of a separate self as Father Keating suggests, I have let go of my particular worries, concerns, preoccupations, regrets, self-importance. I have made space for all that is. I become filled with sky, morning light, the train whistle, Frank making oatmeal. In emptying myself of all the Susieness, I can enter a much expanded territory where I am porous to all the world and know that it is me and I am it.

Don’t you just love a good paradox? The less space I take up, the larger I become, until my shrinking elder body and my foggy elder mind become indistinguishable from the vastness around me. This is what we mean when we say we go back where we came from. I’m not there yet, but let’s just say I’m en route.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.