Inside the Egg

"Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

This quote comes from a fascinating story I recently discovered on Stumbleupon (which is a wonderful invention, really).  It is called The Egg written by Andy Weir.  It tells the story from the point of view of a Creator speaking directly to a person addressed as “you”.  This person has just died, and the Creator is patiently explaining what is happening and what will happen next.  The person is not going to some spiritual destination outside this world.  As the Creator explains, the only way to go is back into the world, to live another life.  This is because there is only one identity, one person, with many incarnations.  Everyone in the world ever, has only been one person, and every time this person dies, he/she returns to live anew in the world.

This is a very heady thought.  The person in the story seems to think so, as well:

            “Wait. I’m everyone!?”

            “Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

            “I’m every human being who ever lived?”

            “Or who will ever live, yes.”

            “I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

            “And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

            “I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.

            “And you’re the millions he killed.”

            “I’m Jesus?”

            “And you’re everyone who followed him.”

The point of all this is for the person, the child of the Creator, to grow and learn.  With each life, the person gains new knowledge and perspective about the world and about the self.  The universe, therefore, is an egg, and when the embryonic person has lived every life there has ever been or ever will be, he/she will be “born.”

It’s a lovely story, and there’s a great deal of truth in it.  One of the things I like very much is the way it is written.  It is dominated by dialogue between the Creator, “I” and the child/embryo, “you.”  This first- and second-person device neatly sidesteps the need to give these two characters an identity.  Not only can the reader step easily into the shoes of the child, but the Creator can be any god-figure that the reader chooses—Allah, or Zeus, or Buddha, or Mother Earth, for the use of first person also eliminates the requirement for a gender.  In addition, with the dialogue, there’s no need of time or place, which are, after all, human ideas that would be of little use outside the world we live in.  So simply by making good choices in his methods of writing, Weir creates the perfect “space” in which to present his idea.

I’m not saying that I literally believe that every person in the world was, is or will be myself.  But metaphorically, the idea that every human being is every other human being has merit.  If we consider the child/embryo identity to be, not a single entity, but the ideal of mankind, then the story takes on a new truth.  Every cruelty we inflict on others undermines the whole of humanity, while every kindness we offer strengthens that ideal and makes it more real.  The only way, then, to really make ourselves into what we could be is to experience and understand the lives of others.

Now, unless the universe really is an egg—and who knows?  Maybe Weir is onto something here—managing this kind of empathy and understanding will be next to impossible.  But I believe that everyone is capable of it.  I believe that the mankind is maturing, that gradually we are learning to look beyond ourselves and discover what it means to be better people.  Maybe, in a hundred years or a thousand, we will have grown enough to be “born.”  And when that happens…well, who can imagine what kind of wondrous things will be possible for us then? 

Live Each Day As If It Were Your First

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”  Most of us will have heard this quote before.  It’s commonly used for important days—weddings, births, graduations, or smaller, more personal events that send you on a different path.  But it’s a bit of a confusing statement.  For example, what exactly is “the rest of your life”?  What makes it so different from the life that you’ve been living up until this day?  You will still breathe air and look at things.  You will still get up in the morning, go to work, get things in your eyes, trip over the shoes you left on the floor the night before.  In its banal realities, life doesn’t change all that much.

So what does it mean, to be looking at “the rest of your life”?  For me, I like to think of it as a path.  The metaphor has been used before, of course, but the old sayings have stuck around because they work.  Life is a path, then, and a person’s life, while it may twist around or squirm under certain obstacles along the way, generally heads in a single direction.  You decide that direction with goals or dreams that guide you, and with your “eyes on the prize” as it were, you trot along your path.

Following this logic (no pun intended), there will come a time when you change your direction, for any number of reasons.  Maybe the destination you had in mind is no longer realistic, or you no longer want to end up there.  Maybe you discover another goal or dream that is more appealing.  Maybe, and unfortunately, something happens that forces you to find a different way.  But in that moment—on “the first day of the rest of your life”—you make a turn.  It can happen quickly, and so subtly that you might not even notice.  But it happens.

The funny thing is, and the reason I’m rambling in metaphor, a life can change in a heartbeat.  The change can be catastrophic, or it can be as simple as changing your mind.  One little action can send you somewhere you never expected.  And there is no quantifiable length to “the rest of your life.”  The time stretches or shrinks as necessary.  Therefore, every day might be the first in a new life, a new path or journey.  Every single day has that potential, and you never know which day might be the one you look back upon as that critical turning point.  So we should treat each day with that kind of respect, and live it, not as if it were our last, but as if it were the first of something wonderfully new.

Nothing Has Life Except The Incomplete

Given any opportunity, I would call myself a complex person.  I have deep thoughts, educated opinions (on some things), and a way of wording these thoughts and opinions that makes me sound worthy of someone’s attention.  Yet I find myself very uninteresting these past few weeks.  I have nothing to think about, nothing to say that I could say with any real confidence in my listener’s interest.  So here I am, twenty-five days after my last post, indulging myself in wondering why.

It isn’t that I haven’t been motivated to work.  I’ve written dozens of pages in my various writing projects, and work progresses in my music, as well.  When it comes to my blog, however, the record of my deep thoughts and intelligent opinions, I’ve got nada.  Why?

I’ve been going through some of my old journals, recently, and in one of them is page after page of insightful contemplations on nature, my relationships, and the world in general.  There are dozens of them, dated within days of one another.  True, these written musings were assignments for a class, but we had no prompts, and I don’t remember ever struggling to find something to write.  Three times a week, sometimes more, there was something that inspired me, something that I wanted to remember, to think about--for example, is it a good thing that we can perceive differences between human faces and features?  What does my name mean, and what does that meaning mean for who I am, if anything?  Why do we call it "falling" in love?  And this was four years ago, at the beginning of a college education meant to make me more complex and insightful.  What does it mean that I don’t have anything to say now?

The only variable that seems to matter is environment.  Back then, I was introducing myself to the Hollins community, which is known for its creativity and open-minded acceptance of all kinds of opinions.  Surrounded by intelligent people, all seeking their own answers to hundreds of questions, I couldn’t help but seek on my own, even if I didn’t know what questions to ask. 

Now, heaven forbid that I imply my family is not intelligent.  My parents, my brothers and sisters, they are all brilliant people, with their own feelings and thoughts on the world.  But I can’t help but shake the sense that for me, this is a place of answers and not of looking for them.  This is home; it is a destination, not a stop on the journey.  So while my creativity remains untouched, I don’t feel the need to dig deeper.  I don’t need to think about myself or my world, because this familiar place gives me a comfortable picture of both.

I don’t really want to be comfortable, though.  I want to search, to agonize, to fret and rejoice and contemplate what is within and without.  I want to question myself, and I want some of those questions to go unanswered.  Yeats was right: to have life, we need to be incomplete, because that is what makes us move, makes us question, makes us glow.

In Response to Bad Metaphors and Cruel Theology

Here’s a very important writing tip: when it comes to metaphors, a little bit goes a long way.  The same advice might be useful when you’re talking about faith.  I just finished reading a blog post on The Christian Post entitled Kill Your Sin Before It Kills You.  If you choose to click the link, good luck.  The article consists of an extended metaphor comparing a pet snake to personal sin.  The writer of the post explains that we are all given this pet snake at birth, and throughout our lives we are tempted to feed and play with this pet, and we believe—erroneously, according to the author—that we can control the snake.

Okay.  I can run with that.  But by the sixth time this pet snake is mentioned, I’m rolling my eyes.  Yeah, man, I get it.  Also, this metaphor doesn’t actually work very well.  Sin isn’t something you can kill, because no one is perfect, and no one ever finishes making him- or herself a better person.  It’s a never-ending process.  About halfway through the article, the writer seems to realize this, and informs his readers that “[sin] is not just a snake—it’s a zombie snake.”  As one of my friends put it, “umm…”  Metaphors also don’t mix.  Ever.  If you don’t have one that works, don’t use it.

Now, I can see how this writer thought the metaphor would be perfect.  In the Bible, the serpent was the creature who tempted Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  It is the embodiment of sin.  Rather fitting, right?  And the writer even has a real-life story to fit the metaphor, which makes it even more powerful, right?

Except this is my real beef with this article.  The story the writer told?  It involves a man in his community who once had a pet snake, a boa constrictor which strangled the man, who died nine hours later.

I’m sorry, but using a story like this to lecture people about their sins is incredibly poor taste.  By using the story in this way, the writer implies that the owner of the snake got exactly what he deserved.  No word on whether this man was a bad person, by the way.  The writer has gotten so lost in his metaphor that the real snake has become sin, and so he condemns the man for “playing with the snake”.  The poor man has been sacrificed in order to make the writer’s close-minded point.        

There are many other complaints I could make about this post—the excessive use of ellipses, the use of an accusatory “you” rather than an all-encompassing “we”, the Bible verse in every second paragraph—but I’ll stick to the main point.  This writer takes an example of a man he probably knew and, showing no respect for the dead, uses him and a bad metaphor to point a critical finger at his readers.  Well, sir, to you I say in equal Biblical style: “There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy.  Who are you to judge your neighbor?”  James 4:12.  Give that to your snake to chew on.

Regarding My Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Self

I was filling out a job application this morning—and the various irritations and outbursts coming with that activity are the content of another blog post some other time—and during the process I was required to list the expiration date of my driver’s license.  Gamely I pulled the little card with its thuggish self-portrait out of my wallet, and I was struck by the year that I saw.  2018.  Two thousand and eighteen.  It’s only six years away, but it might have been sixty for the amount of thought I’ve put into that date. 

All my life, I’ve been dreaming about this year, 2012.  Well, not all my life.  As a child I didn’t care what year it was, and what an enviable position that is.  Then, upon entering middle school, the year 2008 was the pinprick of light in the distance: high school graduation.  Once that came, I celebrated myself vaguely for a while, then set my sights on the next level of achievement.  Ever since then, my only goal has been May 2012—simply to make it that far, to survive the work and the trouble and the life to be lived, so to obtain that moment of glory in my college education.  And this morning it occurs to me, with a mild sense of panic, that this moment is gone.

What do I dream about now?  For me, an abstract, hopeful kind of dream is just not enough.  I need to know what I’m looking at, to be aware of what’s coming.  But where will I be in six years?  Driving my son to preschool, my baby daughter to the doctor for a checkup?  Flying out of Korea at the end of my most recent worldwide book tour?  Living in a box somewhere in the intestines of the world?  Or still sitting on this pull-out bed in my parent’s sitting room?  (Heaven forbid: much as I love my family, I’d rather take the box.  At least it would make a good story.)

I just don’t know.  I have no idea.  And it occurs to me that most people live their lives this way.  Oh, sure, we most of us have a reasonable certainty where we will be, and things like a house, a job, a family, tie us down a bit more.  But I, having none of these things, am floating untethered in outer space.  No bonds, which  means no boundaries.  And I don’t know whether to be thrilled or terrified.

So I write this now for the curious, perhaps settled, and probably wiser self who will come back in June of 2018: Don’t forget this feeling.  Don’t forget that anything can happen, because you can make anything happen.  Laugh at your wild ideas about the future, because I’m sure none of them will be true.  And smile at the thought that once you were afraid of the world, because by this time, you’ll know enough about to face it with equanimity.  Best of luck to me, and to you, too, because you, of course, have your own problems to deal with.

Oh, and please don’t freak about turning thirty in two years.  It is NOT A BIG DEAL.

The Lesson of Mistakes

Sometimes, when you take on a responsibility or a project, a single problem can send everything spiraling downward.  Everyone’s had those days: the ones where nothing seems to go right, no matter how prepared you are.  When the pressure’s on, one mistake can turn into several, and each one makes you feel worse, and more likely to make another mistake because of the distraction. 

Something like this happened this morning, not to me, but to someone else, which is almost as bad.  Our minister is gone for a few weeks, and so we have a few substitutes to fill in on Sundays.  The woman who took on the job this morning is our newest fill-in minister, and she seemed to have a rough go of it.  There were a few things she added to the order of worship, which is a risky business with habit-bound Presbyterians.  I was prepared at the beginning for eye-rolls and stone glances, but there was more trouble to be had.  Several mistakes filled up the morning—our leader picked up the wrong prayer at the wrong time, and we had no children for children’s time (fortunately I and a few of the more precocious teenagers were willing to sit up front for a few minutes and pretend).  Then the organist (also a substitute) missed the cue to leave the organ and cross to the piano for the anthem.  That was one of the more awkward silences I’ve experienced—what could we do?  In my particular church, no one tells the organist what to do. 

As I watched the leader, I could just imagine the gut-twisting nervousness that she must have felt. When you’re in that situation, when you’re the one everyone looks at as things are falling apart, you might want to just leave the room, but you literally cannot.  Everyone expects you to be the one that fixes things, even if the fix consists of barreling on to get it all over with.  I wondered if she was upset about how things went.  Now, you would think a church congregation is one of the more forgiving audiences to experience this kind of thing, and mine is one of those more likely to meet mistakes like this with laughter, or with understanding smiles.  But people always have certain expectations from their leaders, and a leader with pride in herself would find this kind of morning very frustrating.

I choose to think of this, however, in a positive light.  Things happen, and these mistakes, while mortifying, can teach us something.  If we let our minds linger on what we’ve done wrong in the past, we tend to mess up more as we continue on.  In the end, our mistakes only matter in that they teach us what to do or what not to do next time--we can’t let them keep us from moving onward.  I admire the strength of a woman who can not only take on a position that isn’t hers, but also introduce changes and keep it all together when things don’t go quite as planned.  That is a form of courage, and we all have it to some degree.  All we need is to be more aware of it.

Blast From the Past: Metaphysical Musings

Today I was going through my rambling journals, searching for notes I had made at one point for a story I have started writing.  I was looking in all the wrong places, and as I did I came across several musings that I had written down at one point.  Though the quality of the writing is rather nebulous, I am glad that I found them, because they include thoughts that I’m glad to come back to.

For example, an excerpt from volume 11, p. 51:

“The self is the eternal mystery.  Everything we do, the questions we ask, the things we look for, all of them in some way lead back to us trying to explain who and what we are.  We are ghosts with no pasts…struggling to figure out who put us here and why.  The self is that which seeks desperately for purpose, something to distract from the yawning uncertainty that touches all of us.  After all, while there is a neatly spinning world full of things we know, it spins through a universe whirling with things we can never be sure of.  We are the largest mystery, and despite that or perhaps because of it, we cannot abide mysteries.”

Now, I am my own critic in reading back over this—the voice is a bit pretentious, and the wording rather obscure in places.  But there’s a few interesting ideas in there.  I wrote this, by the way, in January of 2010, at which time I was taking a seminar about creativity.  Professor Larson encouraged us to ask questions that had no answers, to adventure into ideas where we had no right to be and start poking around.  The above excerpt was one result of this experimental period.

Creativity, I believe, rises out of a wish to explain oneself and one’s world.  We make up stories—or paint or build things, or pretend to be other people, or however we choose to follow a dream—so that we can learn more about the world and our own place in it.  Faith isn’t the only thing that can tell us why we are here, though it does attack the bigger question.  For me, though, the answer to the little question—why I, personally, am here in this world—is my writing, and my music, and the understanding of myself that these things give me.  By understanding myself, I can understand others, at least a little bit.

But it’s not enough to write one thing.  Though it’s been said, many times many ways: it’s not the destination, but the journey.  It’s not the answer, but the asking.  The simple fact that we are trying to figure out a mystery beats back the terror of not knowing.          

Pretty hefty metaphysical stuff for a Saturday afternoon.  Sometimes, though, you have to wonder about these things.  “What is the ultimate truth about ourselves?” Sir Arthur Eddington once asked.  He offers a few answers, and then says, “There is one elementary inescapable answer.  We are that which asks the question.”