That which is unchosen
On Monday morning I passed through the little footpath that leads to the children’s playground at the back of our house. It’s my shortcut to everywhere. Litter-pickers don’t work at the weekend, nor do those with fresh paypackets and the urge to celebrate with their friends on beer and fast food, who gather where they can sit in the open air on the low walls provided. There are “No Dogs” signs but dogs can’t read and their owners don’t care.
Emerging from the shortcut into the playground I heard the single word “Unchosen”, as if whispered by an angel. I took it to be a comment on the litter, and what I wrote in my last : “I ended up here, which is exactly where I want to be.” “Here” means everything that it can mean, including this particular spot on earth, in all its unchosen states, desirable or otherwise.
There are some whose paths are swept clean wherever they go, perhaps with a red carpet unrolled before them. These are the privileged, whose wealth and power can give up to 99% protection against the unchosen—like bathroom disinfectants in their fight against germs. The human ambition towards total security is understandable, but I seem to have lacked it as far back as I can remember. I’ve recently been making some tentative efforts at memoirs of my adult life. (They’re not for public viewing, at least in my lifetime.) I discover I’ve been at the opposite end of the spectrum. Instinctively I saw that working to any kind of planned goal would be self-incarceration, like living in a gated community. Or perhaps I was never able to see what I really wanted in this world. I couldn’t have defined what it was, only that I dimly understood it to be a feeling, not to be imagined, but recognized when it happened. There was no way of chasing it. So I took what was offered indifferently, wayfaring on a choiceless path. All this happened without awareness at the time. And so I have found value in looking back in wonder at what happened, and the suffering it brought, not always just to me; and perhaps the point of it all.
I wonder if I unconsciously knew that the choiceless is more to be treasured than privilege. That which arrives unsought is a gift. It comes like an ore dug up from the earth. You might mistake it for dirt. It needs to be smelted. The process can take a long time, perhaps most of your life. Then it shines bright. Such is the nature of blessings.
I had a guru once who used to say that “the thing you are looking for is within inside of you.” Aside from being ungrammatical, it was quite off the mark. You could look inside yourself for a lifetime, and find nothing. You might “die wondering” like a virgin spinster. Having given his methods a trial for thirty years, I can speak out with confidence, perhaps not just for myself. Sometimes the personal is indeed the universal.
What was I looking for? A feeling. Where did I find it? Not in myself alone; but where the “I” touches the All, by which I mean the world, a reality which inwraps me in love’s embrace. Says Blake,
Meanwhile, there are millions whose only privilege is to be alive. All the rest is unchosen. And there are those who would sweep away the divine embrace as outdated superstition, offering material progress for all as a substitute. It turns out to be a skimpy blanket, too small and threadbare; easily snatched away. Many there are, and always have been, who depend on blessings. What a blessing is, I can’t rationally say; only that it is something given.
Emerging from the shortcut into the playground I heard the single word “Unchosen”, as if whispered by an angel. I took it to be a comment on the litter, and what I wrote in my last : “I ended up here, which is exactly where I want to be.” “Here” means everything that it can mean, including this particular spot on earth, in all its unchosen states, desirable or otherwise.
There are some whose paths are swept clean wherever they go, perhaps with a red carpet unrolled before them. These are the privileged, whose wealth and power can give up to 99% protection against the unchosen—like bathroom disinfectants in their fight against germs. The human ambition towards total security is understandable, but I seem to have lacked it as far back as I can remember. I’ve recently been making some tentative efforts at memoirs of my adult life. (They’re not for public viewing, at least in my lifetime.) I discover I’ve been at the opposite end of the spectrum. Instinctively I saw that working to any kind of planned goal would be self-incarceration, like living in a gated community. Or perhaps I was never able to see what I really wanted in this world. I couldn’t have defined what it was, only that I dimly understood it to be a feeling, not to be imagined, but recognized when it happened. There was no way of chasing it. So I took what was offered indifferently, wayfaring on a choiceless path. All this happened without awareness at the time. And so I have found value in looking back in wonder at what happened, and the suffering it brought, not always just to me; and perhaps the point of it all.
I wonder if I unconsciously knew that the choiceless is more to be treasured than privilege. That which arrives unsought is a gift. It comes like an ore dug up from the earth. You might mistake it for dirt. It needs to be smelted. The process can take a long time, perhaps most of your life. Then it shines bright. Such is the nature of blessings.
I had a guru once who used to say that “the thing you are looking for is within inside of you.” Aside from being ungrammatical, it was quite off the mark. You could look inside yourself for a lifetime, and find nothing. You might “die wondering” like a virgin spinster. Having given his methods a trial for thirty years, I can speak out with confidence, perhaps not just for myself. Sometimes the personal is indeed the universal.
What was I looking for? A feeling. Where did I find it? Not in myself alone; but where the “I” touches the All, by which I mean the world, a reality which inwraps me in love’s embrace. Says Blake,
Eternity is in love with the productions of timeThe attraction is mutual and ecstatic. And thus there is Heaven on Earth, always present, visible to us when we’re in a state of grace.
-----
I didn’t mean for these thoughts to fly off into the sky. I too am privileged, up to a comfortable point. I’m sure my regular and target readers are too. Privilege can come by itself, but shouldn’t be taken for granted. In England we have a nickname for those who have nothing better to do than deplore litter and fouling by dogs in the streets: “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”. One might have a sense of entitlement, and be irked by that pesky 1% fly in the ointment. Bless such people, for they too will be swallowed up by death just like the less fortunate. Meanwhile, there are millions whose only privilege is to be alive. All the rest is unchosen. And there are those who would sweep away the divine embrace as outdated superstition, offering material progress for all as a substitute. It turns out to be a skimpy blanket, too small and threadbare; easily snatched away. Many there are, and always have been, who depend on blessings. What a blessing is, I can’t rationally say; only that it is something given.
shortcut to everywhere
no dogs! On the right is the back of my house
dogs can’t read . . .
32 Comments:
Very interesting. Have just sent some emails which basically wonder about "choices".
o, oops, wrong gurgle account (am trying to recover some funds held in "ad-choices' from youtube or some such. Not easy for a relatively dingbat "algorithmic" idiot like me).
Which begs the question. What is an "algorithm". Is that in any way related to 'humanistic' Rhythms?
Davoh (a) whatever the dictionary says (b) yes, there is a fundamental interconnectedness between all things.
Glad you liked it ZACL. I agree the guru's words might be spot on for some. But they're only saying that the needle is somewhere in the haystack. The other day I sucked a heavy darning needle into the vacuum cleaner; emptied the dust and went through it carefully. No needle. So I dismantled the Dyson, turned it upside-down, and then the needle dropped out of the bend. Which goes to show that you need to know which part of the haystack to look.
Seriously though, the guru continues to have some followers; and I don't mean to belittle his role in my path.
"That which arrives unsought is a gift."
I like this. It's one of those sentences that keeps saying more every time your mind passes over it again.
By the way, thr other day I picked up "Writing Down the Bones", which you mentioned a while back. I saw it again in the store and I snatched it up.
I was just sitting down to look it over a little while ago, and I haven't gotten far and already I'm a bit irked by her suggestion of writing with a fountain pen with replaceable cartridges. I have nothing against fountain pens or their recommedation in general, although I don't have much experience with using one. Fountain pens have an elegant mystique about them and they make a nice script. My problem is more with WHY she recommends it. After making a blanket denunciation of ball-point pens, felt pens, and pencils for being too "slow", she recommends the fountain pen as faster. Now, like I said, I don't know much about fountain pens, but I've never found slowness to be a problem with a good ball-point pen. I feel like she has a writer's "fetish" for fountain pens and she's rationalizing it on the grounds that they're more efficient writing instruments. I myself have a thing for old typewriters, but if I recommended it as more efficient than a modern word processer, I'd rightly expect people to consider me to be a delusional curmudgeon. Plenty of virtues can still be ascribed to a typewriter at this late date, but efficiency isn't one of them.
Then there's also the matter of my being left handed. As I'm sure you know from being left handed as well, my hand tends to smear ink sometimes as it brushes across the line as I'm writing. This varies depending on the pen and the ink, and I imagine that a fountain pen has much more of a propensity for smearing. Now, do I really expect her to take this into account and customize her recommendations around me personally? Of course not. However, if someone is going to take up the dubious task of offering advice, whether it's a writer or a guru, they should at the very least have a handle of what sizes are universal and what sizes need to be adjustable.
It's a small thing, but that's what gets me about it. You have a writer that broadcasts that she's going to go the free and loose route with her teaching, and right off the bat she's being so rigdly adamant about something as picayune as the choice of a pen. Granted, she's not insisting on, but it's clear that she considers it the "best" choice and for reasons that I'm very leary about.
So I can't say I'm off to the best start, but hopefully it will get better.
I do like fountain pens, though. I may even go out and get one.
It's just that when a writer starts talking about their personal fetishes as though they're rules to live by, I start to get the sense that they take a goofy, superstitious approach to their craft, and that the act of writing is just as much a mystery to them as it is to anyone else even though they may have some talent or may have achieved some modest success with it. I get the sinking feeling that they haven't really gained any helpful insights into the process or at least they don't know how to properly articulate them.
I know. That's a lot from a pen. I hope she'll prove me wrong.
I'm glad you brought up this topic, Bryan. Your second comment on fountain pens nails the issue exactly.
First I’ll confess to being more of a fountain pen fetishist than the author of Writing Down the Bones. It goes back years before reading her book. I refuse to use a ball-point unless desperate, though have no objection to pencil. My ritual is to use traditional blue-black “registrar’s ink” refilled from a bottle. And yet, there’s no logic to it, no practical use. My handwriting may stay unfaded for hundreds of years, but it’s almost illegible, even to me, and I seldom read my own scribbles. I write things down because they seem such valuable insights at the time that I’m scared of losing them, so they go on repeating in my head till I ensure their preservation. Writing them down is a form of exorcism. It lets you move on.
Natalie Goldberg is following the standard pattern of a self-help book—prescribing a recipe, in which, as you say, she doesn’t know which ingredients or which aspect of the cooking gives the finished dish its special appeal. So every rule must be followed. I regularly get given such books, from younger daughter & son-in-law, e.g. on Celtic mysticism or the spirits inhabiting trees. I don’t think it’s coincidence that they haven’t quite freed themselves from the same guru I mentioned.
“That which arrives unsought is a gift.” One that you and I get from Natalie Goldberg is to see that we must distance oneself from being her disciple, or indeed anyone’s disciple. We can be inspired by what hits us as true, and still keep our freedom. Fetishes are personal and nobody else’s business.
"...she doesn’t know which ingredients or which aspect of the cooking gives the finished dish its special appeal."
Yes, exactly! That's what I was trying to get at with the follow up comment. That puts it perfectly.
Not that anyone is likely to notice or care, but I meant to say "elder daughter and son-in-law" above
Thanks for leading us along the littered path to the blessing to which it leads.
"I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall."
Wm Blake
John Uebersax:
"By a demonstration we mean an attempt by Plato to bring to our conscious awareness an insight by means other than logical argument. In many cases with Plato this amounts to eliciting an anamnesis (an un-forgetting or recollection) of some previously known or latent knowledge. For example, we previously considered how Plato’s contemplation of the Form of the Good in Symposium 211–212 can be seen as a demonstrative proof of the existence of God. Similarly, some passages of Plato seem intended to evoke in the reader an experiential awareness of the soul’s immortality."
https://catholicgnosis.wordpress.com/
Thanks, Ellie, I like the Blake verse.
. . . and as for the other quote & associated link, I may indirectly respond to them in my next.
Greater inner awareness leads to a greater awareness of the world.
Hi Anonymous, good to hear from you. Yes, because the separation between inner awareness and the world is paper-thin, translucent and capable of being perforated.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as choicelessness. The state of not-choosing is a choice! Whether to accept or reject whatever is offered by life is a decision. Even passivity is a decision not to act. So-called decisive people, aren't they simply obeying prompts from elements in their character which were already there at birth and then consolidated by their environment, influences etc? Take two children brought up in the same family, in the same way: one follows exactly the same path as his parents; the other one 'rebels' and adopts a totally opposed lifestyle. Who is 'choosing' ?
My point was that a privileged person is able to make many choices. A person who is born relatively unprivileged has little protection against “the unchosen”. The one can “make his dreams come true”. The other can merely dream, for he’s pretty much stuck in his situation.
Thus Siddartha Gautama was born into privilege and could have anything he wanted. Certain experiences made it all turn sour for him. He looked around and didn’t see anything he wanted, so he renounced the lot.
Of course, his act of complete renunciation was a choice, but once it was made, he joined the ranks of the “intentionally homeless”, to use a modern term. As a street beggar, he was exposed to the “unchosen”, without the protection of privilege. He could have starved, perished from exposure or been murdered. Exactly like our modern refugees and migrants.
"Choiceless" is a relative term. My first choice(!) of title was “That which is unchosen”. I might change it back in view of your comment. For the thing that inspired me to write the post was the idea of the unchosen as a gift which could in some circumstances be turned into a blessing. I didn’t want to raise the issue of freewill versus determinism.
I’m therefore grateful, as ever, for your input.
Ian....sorry,you chose Vincent! I understand your point about privilege. Indeed a huge part of this planet is filled with people who never had any of the choices the likes of us have had since birth. Any hardships we've endured are nothing in comparison to what so many face every day - not only hunger, poverty, oppression, cruelty, but also severe disability, illness, pain - the list is endless. Certainly these are unchosen afflictions/circumstances and I find it hard to see how they could be turned into blessings by those who are suffering. But even within such extreme restrictions, tiny and/or huge choices are continually being made by individuals. In cases of oppression and injustice (eg slavery, apartheid etc)if a few choose to rebel, then others follow. One could even say that exercising the ability to choose is the key to survival, both in a physical, psychological and spiritual sense. Which doesn't mean that the choices made are always the best! If survival is meant (that's how I mean it) as not being the privilege of the 'fittest' but of all.
I wish I hadn't said "grateful as ever" in my last response! I accept that you find it hard to see how the unchosen can be turned into blessings. However I did say how this can be so, in outline, and expect to say more in future posts. I'm not going to be deflected by comments from what I have to say in my own way and time, for anyone who finds it meaningful.
You write to support activism as a way to improve conditions in the world, fine. I shall not argue with you. We each play our part. You may heckle, up to a point. I'm writing for someone who wants to tune in to what I have to say. It may take a while to express myself properly, but I find the journey worthwhile, and you continue to be welcome to comment. But I shall learn from past skirmishes, and not always take you on.
My previous comment was hasty, but let it stand.
On reflection, I read your response as a legitimate question, and not as a heckle! I am, after all, grateful as ever. I will address the question, later.
And when I said “I'm not going to be deflected”, it was in response to what you said about oppression & injustice, starting rebellions and what one may do for survival. There is material for debate here, but it’s unrelated to the topic under investigation.
On the other hand, I do intend to say something in next or future posts about the enduring of hardship, which you mentioned above.
In my opinion what Ian writes is not prose in spite if its appearance. He writes poetry which Larry calls the highest form of truth. Of course it is not truth itself because truth cannot be contained in words. Anyone who wishes to convey truth packages it is the garment which he is capable of providing.
The rubbish strewn along the path and spilling out of its container are the cast offs thought by the privileged to be nonessential. But among them are the links that hold it all together, and the unrecognized potential which is the catalyst for synthesizing the next breakthrough. It is we who refuse to associate with the sick and weak, the dirty and disorderly, who imprison ourselves is a sterile cage and pretend that we don't have the key which will open it.
Thanks, Ellie, there are so many times I've wanted to express what you said in your first paragraph. I do feel it is like writing a poem: trying to capture the feeling which may be a fleeting one; paying attention to the words themselves, the way they flow, and to be completely honest—while using poetic licence, for the reader’s sake.
And your second paragraph is prose poetry indeed! Creating an original thought, which is the more direct form of "catalyst for synthesizing the next breakthrough".
You've also said something I've long intended to say about why "here is exactly where I want to be". When I pass through "my shortcut to everywhere", through the children's playground, skirting round the derelict old school playground, we reach the Ledborough Road (name altered, you won't find it on the map) and see a range of humanity as diverse as any on earth, including the sick, weak, dirty and disorderly, and some popinjays too, but rarely any member of the educated middle-class bourgeoisie. (Only my ex-dentist, scurrying past so furtively he fails to recognize me.)
I can't describe how enriching it is, just to walk down the road and say, this is where I live, these are my people, these are the representatives of all people everywhere, I love them, I shall be happy one day to drop dead here in the street, if that's the way it is meant to be. Just as the rats and blackbirds, slugs and snails are representatives of the animal kingdom and loved too, though unfortunately we have to kill some of them.
Ellie you got me going, I embarrass my own self with it.
All I can add is my own heartfelt appreciation to you and Ellie for knowing something so much about love.
And this concerning "enduring of hardship":
https://youtu.be/zfBBn2yGVC0
"Something" doesn't belong in that sentence. It did but after I reworded what I wanted to say it didn't anymore.
Ian, my apologies! I'm a bad commenter. What I mean by 'bad' is that my thoughts take off on a flight of their own, stimulated by thoughts you've expressed in a post and then I just follow where the flight leads instead of staying with the thought you were expressing and responding only to this. I really don't mean to deflect or heckle you and I appreciate your understanding. In a live conversation, I find it much easier to restrain my tendency to go 'off-piste'. Sorry! Ellie is right, I should pay attention to the poetry.
The thing is, Natalie, I’m like you in this so I have to pull back & use discipline otherwise things get out of hand, & I might engage with the off-piste ideas, setting a bad precedent. And the trouble with comments is that you can't amend them.
No harm done and please feel free not to censor yourself.
Cindy, thanks for the link & reminding me of that wonderful film, The Secret Life of Bees. I have the book too but haven’t got very far with it. Not only that but someone gave me for Christmas another novel by Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings about a girl called Handful, the 10-year-old daughter of a domestic slave mother, who’s given as a birthday present to “her owner’s most difficult daughter”, as it says on the blurb. I’ll have to save it for a special time.
To make amends, while hanging up washing on our indoor lines, I listened to a random bit of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIWiB3wPm9M - a ten-hour audio-book of the Bees novel, beautifully read.
I think the big question that's really gone unaddressed in all of this is: Should I buy a fountain pen?
I’ve been very happy with Lamy. They do a left-handed nib, but anything cheaper than a Studio has a sculpted grip which may not suit you, for it dictates the way you hold the pen. I like my Nexx but I had to mould the rubber grip with a soldering iron.
Thanks for the post Vincent, much to ponder and agree with... These littered common places are full of questions for me too.
Thank you, Michael, words from such an apostle of literature mean much.
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