Tabula Rasa

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

The uncertainty that we live in now can be a source of deep anguish. Awakening on a summer morning, we find the blue sky has turned a dirty yellow. Everything is still but not in a good way. The stillness is the world holding its breath because breathing is hazardous to our health. It was a humid ninety-five degrees in Minneapolis last week and up north closer to the Canadian wildfires, it was raining ash. Lettuce is the enemy. Frank says ominously that he never expected to live to see it, the climate apocalypse. He worried about our children, grandchildren and great-grands, but he thought we’d float right out on a wave of boomer self-regard. This in itself is an interesting new phenomenon that I’m becoming aware of. Will I get out while the getting’s good? Will I outrun my brand new glaucoma diagnosis?

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Sometimes I feel like a member of the nativist Know Nothing party that popped up in the 1850s. Not because I hold anti-immigrant or anti-Catholic biases as they did, but because I’m aware that I literally Know Nothing. This sense of wandering in a cloud ranges from speculation regarding the meaning of life, to making friends with my devices and through who will win the midterms all the way down to where did I leave my phone. I think I remember putting it on the kitchen table, but it’s not there. Where did it go? I don’t know. This can make an otherwise sane person unravel. “I don’t know” becomes the go-to answer to almost all questions, the most accurate and most honest response, but it’s hard to admit to it over and over again. It is hard to live every day with such far-reaching uncertainty. Relief comes in the form of political, scientific, creative and spiritual systems that exist to ameliorate the anxiety of Unknowing.

The antidote to this anxiety is storytelling. If you don’t know the answer, you make one up. If you can’t find your phone, you try to reconstruct where you were when you last saw it. You tell yourself a story. If someone is inexplicably on your case, you tell yourself a different story about their personal circumstances, what might cause them to behave in such a viperish way. And crucially, if the source of life doesn’t reveal itself to you or provide a map of the path you might consider to airlift you out of the jungle of despondency and turmoil you find yourself stuck in, you develop a story that becomes scripture. Scripture gives shape to our murky origins. It gives us a place to hang our hat. Story in itself is neutral. Some stories elevate our experience and some diminish and crush it. But they are all foundational to what it is to be human because they speak to the universal need to explain why things are the way they are, the need to manage the Unknowing.

I began to question all the narratives vying for my attention twenty some odd years ago when I first heard people talking about The New Story. People who were stepping away from traditional religion with its rules and hierarchies began to formulate an alternative plot line. Instead of being about separation, struggle, and scarcity, the background radiation of capitalism and western religion, The New Story was about interbeing, cooperation and plenitude. There was a great flood of copy that denied the continued viability of the Old Story and promoted the notion that life on the planet would not survive unless the New Story effectively became scripture.

I began to wonder if all these narratives arose to palliate the pain of Unknowing and if the great work now isn’t really the work of developing the capacity to live in the world without explanation, to simply Be.

Living in the existential condition of emptiness, like a complete unknown, is a new continent for me. It’s such a foreign language, or perhaps no language at all, that it’s sometimes difficult to communicate. How do you explain that you no longer feel inclined to explain? I recognize this moment from previous periods of spiritual discovery. There’s always a concern that people won’t understand. In my experience, it feels like I’ve gone off in an unexpected direction where the road maps don’t apply, where the GPS breaks down and I’m thrown back on my own direct encounter with the material world. See the branches of the cottonwood tree out my window fluttering in the wind? I can vouch for that.

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