Mind Games

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

I’m trying to liberate myself from the tyranny of Time. Today, for example, I have essentially nothing to do. No doctor’s appointments, no social engagements, nothing. I’m looking out the sliding glass doors to the balcony at the branches of the enormous cottonwood tree waltzing in the wind and I know that the tree couldn’t care less that it’s 9:43 am on the various digital clocks. I should add I also have an evocative analog clock that hangs on the wall to the left of the front door, the kind you stared at in the front of the room behind the teacher’s desk so you’d know how long you had to sit still before they let you out. The analog clock says 8:43 because I don’t like to monkey with it just to accommodate the gods of daylight savings. Call me a Luddite but while Frank and I are in separate parts of the country each spring, I leave well enough alone. I don’t reset the clock. I also don’t use the dishwasher, the printer, or even the oven. Nuts. Cuckoo bananas. The dishwasher has been known to flood and the printer sometimes gets jammed. I can’t be bothered. My surroundings in Minnesota serve as a reference to my childhood in New York where flatware was washed by hand and letters were pounded out on an old Royal manual. My mother had an oven, of course, but I’m reluctant to use mine lest the smoke alarm should decide to start screeching as it did once when I first moved in, bringing concerned neighbors to the door. Except for the essential laptop and iPhone, I like things just fine the way they are or, more to the point, in the manner of the late Robert Redford, the way they were.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Despite the fact that my cursive is nasty, I was tickled this morning when I saw an item in the NYT about the revival of school composition writing in longhand. Because AI has made term papers about Bismarck, Hester Prynne and so on available in seconds, there is no longer any point in assigning them to high school sophomores. The very word research has been degraded by the quaint notion that you can go online for twenty minutes and become an expert on the efficacy of vaccines or the latest use of antisemitic memes. Kids are no longer writing papers at home in front of the TV and may not even watch TV. They are, according to the Times, writing about their own responses to the bullying of Hester Prynne with number 2 pencils during the school day, leaving them much more time for Tik Tok at home. The entire enterprise is losing its appeal. What is there to teach? What is there to learn? Some people believe that education should prepare kids for the real world, whatever that is. This is the “how to” school of pedagogy…how to balance a checkbook, how to apply for a job. This reduces the Mind to a manual that addresses functional skills but misses the part about Ideas and the Inner Life altogether. On the other hand, maybe the Mind is overrated and maybe there’s no such thing as Time, although the capitalization does confer gravitas.

It’s hard to tell. Especially if you continue to be impressionable as I am at 80 and find that you’re open to new ideas. New ideas arrive like FedEx packages at my doorstep unannounced. This doesn’t necessarily make me more broad-minded, but it does make me feel more alive, even when the ideas are distressing. It makes me somewhat reluctant to give up on my old friend, the Mind. Not being sure where I come down on this question, I made a foray to Half-Price Books the other day where I discovered an original 1957 Vintage paperback of Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. Just in case I harbored any illusions about Truth, the book itself proved to be an exemplar of Impermanence, crumbling in my lap the minute I picked it up. Every page I turned cracked at the spine, scattering desiccated crumbs of wisdom all over the couch. This seemed to underscore Watts’ point about hsin, the ancient Chinese word that best approximates the English word Mind. Hsin, writes Watts, is true, is working properly, when it works as if it were not present. The true mind is no mind. No news is good news.

This gave me something to think about in my otherwise empty, Time-drenched day. I slept deeply and woke up to twenty-four brand new hours, as Thich Nhat Hahn would say. I said the modeh ani, giving thanks for that greatest of blessings and made myself a cup of coffee.

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