Life Isn't Shaped Like a Baseball Bat. I hope.

I hope life isn't shaped like a baseball bat. A bat has a "sweet spot," the part of the bat a batter wants to hit the ball with to send it on a ride. The sweet spot is a small part of the bat, and if you are standing in the batter's box, you are using all the rest of the bat to try to connect the sweet spot with the ball.

If life is like that, then a whole lot of your life is spent trying to get to the sweet spot; the best part. This came up at dinner with friends the other night; not the baseball bat analogy itself, but the sweet spot. And why, when you find something great, a period of time at work, or life, does the sweet spot have to be finite? Why can't it be extended? Why are the best of days numbered? Looking back at 20-ish years working at the same place, one friend could pick out the best five or six years, which were towards the end of his time there, but didn't last beyond that time frame. Things change.

Life is not all about a job, I think many people will tell you--those with a family, hobbies, passions, a relationship. So maybe it is that careers are shaped like baseball bats? I don't know, I think we can all look back on our lives and find different times when things were cranking along as you'd want them. But invariably, life's sweet spots get superseded, or end, or maybe just change when we weren't looking.

Einstein was a pretty smart cat. Let's invoke him here:

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

Maybe that's the rub. That we expect things to stay the same. We expect to keep doing the same things, which seem to be working at the time, but that is only for a time, and we don't see the change coming. What was the sweet spot becomes a rut, a habit, when we aren't paying attention.

What's a good change metaphor? Let's go with water. Mankind dealing with change is like being in water. If you want to get beneath the surface, you can emulate the diver. Per Pablo Neruda:

Time after time
he takes hold of the water, the sand,
and is
born again.
Submerging
each day
to the hold
of the pitiless
current,
Pacific and
Chilean
cold,
the diver
must practice
his
birth again,
make  himself
monstrous
and tentative,
displace himself
fearfully,
grow wise
in his slothful
mobility, like
an underseas
moon.
Even
his thinking
must merge
with the water

Neruda was not kind to paper. But he was frequently on to things. His odes, love poems, and epic "Residence on Earth" are a man reckoning with life, existence, the Universe.

"Even his thinking must merge with water."  When the physicist and the poet say the same thing, it might be time to pay attention. Embrace change. Don't hold onto things for too long expecting them to stay the same. Merge our thinking with water.

Life doesn't have to be shaped like a baseball bat. If life is change, like water, maybe we can be the diver.

Eliot in Your Bones

T.S. Eliot abides. He was the last of the big three mind blowers for me in college (the first two were William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche). Eliot was maybe the biggest of the three, because he combined some of the aesthetic/poetic vibe of Blake with the philosophical depth and inquiry of Nietzsche. My last college essay was on Eliot and the philosophy of F.H. Bradley, who Eliot wrote his PhD dissertation on at Harvard.

In the library at Washington College, I found Eliot's book of essays, "Sacred Wood," where his notion of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," reworked my thinking of the literary tradition we inherit, and how that inheritance requires work and study, it isn't just given to us. And the idea that you don't just read the dead poets to know the past, but also feel it in the here and now:

...not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence: the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that that whole of the literature of Europe from Homer...

Writing with a literature in your bones.

After college I put Eliot down for a while. He had redefined poetry, tradition, allusion, scholarship. And that wasn't the world I was inhabiting at the time. A few years later, at some bookstore or another, I found "Four Quartets." Meeting Eliot the first time was mind blowing and hard work, and deep study. Four Quartets was meeting Eliot again for the first time. This Eliot was lyrical, deep, philosophical. I could read him on my own without needing a library for back up.

This past week I was looking for a book in the garage to give to a friend. During that expedition, I unearthed Four Quartets. It was sleeping in a garage box. The next morning, I started from the beginning:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is redeemable.

Four Quartets are connected meditations on our place in the Universe, about Time, and about the Divine. Each of the poems also represents one of the elements: Burnt Norton is air, East Coker is earth, The Dry Salvages is water, Little Gidding is fire. You want depth? You want philosophy? You want poetry you can delve into a spin your head around? Four Quartets has it,

I've been dwelling in solitude a lot lately, my thoughts inhabiting the space around me. Finding Eliot again has brought back a calm, a peace that I thought I had lost; an introspection that is also a self inquisition:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
         love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the
        dancing.

I fu**ing hate waiting. I am not good at patience. But there is a zen to Eliot's waiting, where the stillness becomes dancing. That's the kind of stillness I need to find. Dance while you wait, please.

Eliot's notion of cyclical time, time that loops back on itself, where the end and the beginning are the same. It's what I find in coming back to Eliot. Again, for the first time. Eliot is in my bones.

     We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

On Air

Air is possibility. We don't even notice it until it adds voice and motion as wind. When air becomes active. When I run I can't drink in enough air, filling my lungs, clearing them, repeat. When the big shit in our lives happen, when heavy or tense or anger or sad happen, we instinctively take deep breaths, looking for air, but not naming it.

Before we got too smart, the ancient Greeks, pre-Socrates, had the Universe broken down into air, water, earth and fire. The elements. Now we've named everything so fancily, we can't even get our minds around it. But we can breathe.

I'm being bird stalked when I run these days. Mostly by male cardinals. For a couple months now, every time I run, I get swooped by one. Almost always when I've forgotten they are watching me, and a fastball of red, or maybe it's a sinker, I don't have a batter's eye anymore, swings by, standing out against green trees and air. Once one lit for a second on a fence right next to the rail trail, nodding as I went by, and I smiled at him. Birds have air figured out.

Air is part of what my heron tattoo is about. The heron inhabits both air and water. Maybe he looks at home in both, or maybe not quite in either. I wanted to make sure both elements were part of the design. Herons inhabit and invoke both.

Wind is air at its most vocal. Air that says, don't fu** with me. The big bad wolf has nothing on wind. I lie in bed and I can hear the wind talking to the trees, unsure who speaks louder in that conversation. I drive over the Bay Bridge to work and feel wind push the car, which when you're that high above the water, that slight reminder says enough. Be kind wind. Be kind.

Brenda Hillman writes the elements. She is working through books on each. Her "Pieces of Air in the Epic," moves through air. She reminds us how cut off, out of sync we are with air:

Wind will rend the suburbs
With information seeking nature

or more depressingly:

They were mostly raised
in tanklike SUVs called Caravan or   Quest; winds rarely visited them.

When we're inside, packed away in our house, or seat-belted comfortably in our cars, we forget that air can be wind. That we absolutely need it to live, to breathe, but it doesn't need us. What if we get so comfortable, so cut off, that the winds rarely visit us? That would suck. No, that would blow.

Hillman brings us back with writing. I think Air is why I run. Elemental Air, filling my lungs to bursting, on the final mile home, Jimi Hendrix's "Stone Free," in my ears, heart pounding, talking to Air. In conversation. I'm not sure who is speaking, who is listening, who is breathing.