“Nature is as fluid and elusive as a thought. Indeed, it is a thought: an unfathomable, compound thought we live in and contribute to. Reality is a shared ‘dream.’ In it, as in a regular dream, the dreamer is himself the subject and the object; the observer and the observed.”
― Bernard Kastrup, Meaning in Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature of Reality
Sitting in this home office, dimly lit with pre-autumnal sepia light from outside, pondering on how my brain's function changes after a couple weeks spent almost entirely in solitude. I mean, there's Zoom time, will be more Zoom time today, but it's not the same as occupying a physical space with other people. I do that with P for a couple hours each evening, lately these days mostly with her sleeping down the hall since she's caught some crud.
Am I lonely? Not particularly. But there's no doubt that my way of thinking changes when there's internal conversation and little else. Thoughts tend to range more broadly and at the same time more deeply, with less on-task problem solving and more observing and contemplating on my surroundings and how little inputs like that "bling" that just emanated from my laptop, announcing the arrival of yet another email, break my concentration.
Yesterday afternoon, in this very spot, I found myself wondering how different my perception of reality would be today if I hadn't spent the last three decades or so in a space governed exclusively by the need to apply logical and analytical reasoning to the messy business of human conflict. What if I dealt with happy people more often? Took a year off to write whatever I felt like writing? At some level it feels like this old noggin and its contents have calcified to the point that there's no reshaping of it all, I am who I am at this late stage of life. But how different might this life feel if it wasn't, as Nathan Bedford Forrest characterized his own life, "a battle from the start"?
It also occurred to me in my afternoon internal ramble that my brief time in the clergy probably ruined me as a trial lawyer. I seem to spend more time trying to defuse confrontation and understand the pain that must be driving the bad behavior of an adversary than figuring out a way to rat-f*ck them when they make a tactical or strategic mistake in a lawsuit. St. Francis would've made a lousy lawyer, mostly because people in crisis and pain often hire lawyers to inflict some of that pain on the person who's hurt them. And if you're not willing to do that, can't find it in your heart, my heart, to wait for them to expose a space where you can jam the knife in . . . I guess there's always mediation.
When P arrived home last night from work she turned in immediately, still battling this crud, then awoke and announced that a nice bowl of wanton soup from the local Thai place might do the trick. I placed the order online, then walked down the hill to Market Street on a perfect late summer afternoon, hills brightly lit from the west by the setting sun. Still pondering on this whole issue of shaping one's reality by how one thinks (okay, how I think), a quote from Marcus Aurelius floated through my head:
“When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one's energy, that one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we're practically showered with them."
And then my thoughts turned to my friend Tom, who just turned 88 last week. Tom's presence among us is something of a miracle, after enduring open heart surgery to correct a potentially fatal condition that would've spirited him away over a decade ago. What has he done with the time those surgeons and anesthetists gave him that day? Been a pastor to hundreds, maybe thousands, injecting just enough Jeremiah into his preaching to call them, us, up short. Taken on the role of beloved uncle or grandfather to a whole generation of folks who've needed that. Been a great friend to me through some of the rougher shoals of life, and the happy postscript.
In sum, he's been a hell of an example of what the late seasons should be if one leads an examined, engaged life. I need to pay attention to that.
Speaking of being called up short, I've been thinking for days of an essay I read in the NYT the other day, a discussion of how the astrophysicist community is being forced to rethink the foundational assumptions that undergird their understanding of the universe.
I have to admit, with every announcement of a "solution" to some glitch in our explanation of the physical reality in which we're immersed, I've felt a certain skepticism. Dark matter. String theory. An equation created to make a prior equation "work". It all feels like one of those medieval cosmological models that tried to make the Ptolemaic system of astronomy real.
Anything that damned complicated can't be right. It's like every airplane ever designed by Grumman (I digress). Eventually this aggregation of exceptions and fillers and escape hatches our astrophysical community has accumulated will give way to a simpler and more elegant explanation. Another Einstein will emerge on the scene with a new reality.
Or maybe it's just our human way of thinking that insists simplicity is elegance is the correct approach. A bias toward Occam's Razor. Maybe creation truly is a cobbled together mess of cosmic duct tape and bond-o patches. That would comport with a god who created our imperfect species of screw-ups in his image. Of course, calling it "creation" is, in and of itself, a loaded assumption.
Whew! I need to get out more.
In the meantime, I'll shuffle into the shower to get ready for a little witness prep and then a deposition. The relentless need to feed the beast.
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