New Year's Resolutions

One of the great pleasures in life is to be able to take a week or two off at the end of a year to make some new year's resolutions. It's a privilege to be able to do this, to have the time and space. I see it as immensely practical, too.

Deciding what is worth doing, before thinking of how to do it, has always seemed to me to an underrated, under-appreciated, work. So it's always a delight to see a young person who is seriously asking this fundamental question, – What is worth doing? - taking his or her time to explore it rather than having to go to immediately into a job or career to make a living. I can well understand parents, who have all they can do to survive and to pay the bills, feeling frustration and anxiety about young people going through this work. “We will be glad when you get all this searching out of your system and settle down.” But it is surely better to think through what is worth doing when young, although it can take a lot of time.

William James wrote and excellent piece on it, What Makes Life Significant, following a earlier excellent piece written by Leo Tolstoy in his A Confession. Both James and Tolstoy wrote those in their fifties, after a whole lot of worldly experience, which may sometimes be necessary in order to work out an individually satisfying answer to the question.

There is the young Thoreau writing at the beginning of Walden; 

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

Thoreau often got criticized for not leading a more conventional life, but I think one of the great values of Walden was that he earnestly took on the question and legitimized it. He said in this connection, for example:

“For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it. ”

So I am in a position to report to you today that there are light snowflakes falling gently, drifting down in front of my windows here in Dayton as I write.

Another reason for taking some time to sort out some resolutions for the new year is to help to protect oneself from the distractions and deceptions that are constantly presented to us, like TV, the latest bubble or confidence game, and such. Life is so short, particularly when you are seventy-three, that you don't want to miss the truly good and to waste what little life remains on something stupid.

Rudolf Steiner wrote somewhere that if you make a resolution, it is best for your spiritual development that you do it, that you follow through on it. I'm sure there are situations in which he is correct, but I think there clearly are also situations when you uncover new realities in your experience that mean you should re-evaluate where you are going, change your mind, abolish the old resolution and set out a new one.

Hope for the Pope

There is a new Pope, Time's “Person of The Year,” who gives us hope.

Pope Francis  - Guardian UK Photo

Radical Republicans are worried by the depth of his concern for poor people and what they see as his “ideology.”

Radical Democrats worry that he will disappoint their hopes because of some personal limitation or because of his position as the head of a group, an institution, that has its own perspective on problems which is often quite contrary to what most human beings need to do or think is right.

A very close friend of mine has a basic criticism of Democrats, saying that they have no principles, and I have another friend whose criticism of Republicans is that they have principles. I see the former as saying that Democrats will just not stand up for what they believe, and the latter as saying that Republicans consider their ideological principles more important than people having food and health care. My own feeling is there is probably some large perspective, with appropriate sophistication, that can accommodate them both. It is fascinating to think that Pope Francis might be able to achieve that large perspective.

He is in an extremely complicated and seemingly impossible situation in which he must coordinate his actions with millions of people, many of whom believe that he is evil itself and would assassinate immediately if they could. He must have personal flaws as we all have personal flaws, and there will  always be many opportunities for him to fail.

I heard someone recently call him “Frankie,” not in disrespect, but in enthusiasm for his humanity. I myself think this is a more healthy approach that calling him “His Holiness.”

We construct a self image by taking outside viewpoints, getting outside and seeing through others' eyes, and thus becoming objective about our selves. All else is solipsism.

So I wonder what it does to him to have everyone going around calling him “Your Holiness” instead of “Frankie.” I wonder what it would do to me if people went around constantly calling me “Your Holiness.” What does it do to a person to be called “Your Majesty” or “Your Honor” or “Sir” or something like that all the time? It seems to me that most such people accept such views as being valid, rarely contradict them and even insist upon them.

I used to enjoy some of  that honorifics play, one particular memory of it being my hearing the mayor of Montreal addressing, with passionate rhetoric, the city council as “Défenseurs de la Foi,” among other titles. It was fun, particularly in its tone and presentment and civility. I loved the historicity of it. Also, we all have the job of getting ourselves through a murderous world, and if a little bit of this helps at the right time and place, so be it.

However, it seems good to me that it has slowly been diminishing over several centuries now, even during my own 71-year lifetime.

Santa Claus through the Chimney

That tale about a fat guy, dressed in red with white trim, living at the top of the world, brought here by flying reindeer, coming down the chimney into the house of every child in the world on one night, carrying an enormous sack of gifts, is way too remote from current definitions of reality to be told without misgivings by parents.

And children, being as bright as they are and picking up everything, must have feelings at some level of being betrayed and deceived.

The imagery of the tale, however, is absolutely brilliant, and valid, on what I will call a spiritual or psychic or mythic or dream level. If you know the “forgotten language” of dreams, for example, the tale and all its imagery present no problems to either adult or child.

*The image of the chimney usually has it as being made of many rectangular red bricks, placed on top and beside each other, interlocking, as is appropriate to the spiritual path.

*Smoke rises up through it as if it were a prayer or other non-substantial communication rising up to heaven, or like the smoke from censers in a church.

*The fireplace is the focus, as it is named in ancient Latin, and is the central image in Alchemy where lead is refined into Gold. This also brings to mind those words of Plutarch that I love to quote, “...the Mind is a fire to be kindled...”

*This coming and going via the chimney like smoke is like the way heaven and earth communicate on Christmas night while we are “asleep.”

* Then there is also this fantastic matter of there being flying reindeer with these antlers branching upwards from their heads like mythic trees. If you see an elk, or a deer, with such antlers in a dream, you are surely seeing a symbol of spiritual development.

*A house itself may well be the most commonly occurring image in our dreams: the “upstairs” indicating thought, the ground floor indicating life at the ground level, the basement indicating the foundation and what it's all built upon.

But the hard everyday reality we experience in this era of returned social darwinism and materialistic science goes more like this:

“None of this fits the real world in which you're going to have to live. It won't get you a job or a marriage or enable you to support a family. Dreams and fairy tales and the spirit will not pay your bills. It's all superstitious humbug. If you don't listen to me, you're going to be poor, alone, and on the street with nothing. Just forget it. Grow up, get tough, and live in the real world.”

Diane Ravitch, “Reign of Error”

Diane Ravitch's new book, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools,” is formidable. She takes on the rich, well-connected “corporate reformers” like Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, test scores, students as commodities, “accountability,” educational “crisis” mongers, charter schools, and vouchers.

The following passage is from her next-to-last chapter, “Privatization of Public Education is Wrong,” p. 301. A highly successful businessman (an ice cream maker) had given a lecture to some teachers on why and how they should operate their school like a business, saying things like “If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn't be in business for long.” The lecture was not well received and one of the teachers asked him what he does when he receives a shipment of inferior blueberries for his ice cream:

“I send them back.”

She jumped to her feet. “That's right!” She barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it's not a business. It's a school.”

The businessman recalls realizing when the teacher said that, “I was dead meat.”

Ravitch proposes eleven “solutions,” devoting one chapter for each. Her first, and I think most important, solution is in the chapter entitled “Begin at the Beginning:”

     "SOLUTION NO. 1 Provide good prenatal care for every pregnant woman."

She is also a wise and thorough critic of an immense amount of erroneous assumption and flawed experiment. She doesn't deal with one of the major questions I have, which is whether or not USA children are truly loved in themselves rather than considered to be impedimenta or ornaments, but neither does any educator that I have read “go there.”

I recognize the inconceivably large body of writing, research, assertion, and argument on the subject of education but I always come back to Plutarch's sentence in his essay “On Listening.” It is compatible with what Ravitch writes. It seems simple but it also seems to be so basic that you can evaluate any theory of educational method by its compatibility with this statement:

“For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.”

What I Will Be Doing During My Last Moments

There is a memorable scene in The Death of Artemio Cruz in which he realizes that he is now dying, and that this is the time and place and way it will end. He had wondered where and when he would die, and here it is.

I just loved the description because I think of dying, well, all the time. My first summer job, when I was sixteen and seventeen years old, was working in a Massachusetts hospital and involved a lot of time alone in the autopsy room. The pathologist would dissect the body as he found necessary then I would do the cleanup – remove and dispose of the guts, organs, brain, blood; wash the body and sew it back up; wrap it up in a shroud and roll it into a bag; call the undertaker to take it away; wash the tools and bench; and then turn out the lights.

Various well-meaning friends, co-workers, and my boss felt that maybe I was too young to see so much death so closely. I thought a lot about that possibility at the time but it was all just truth and reverence to me. I have felt during the sixty or so years since then that the experience had no adverse effect on me or even any noticeable effect at all.

Caution! This could be deeply upsetting or offensive but you too can see what goes on in an autopsy room by going to this link, although actually being there and smelling death is different from just seeing these photos.

But sometimes now I reflect that perhaps the experience had much more effect on me than I have understood. I think the source of my error has been that I have not realized that others just don't think about it as much as I do. To me, the thought of death enters into everything I say, think, or do. But when I talk to others now or really get inside their shoes or see through their eyes, I believe that, relatively speaking, they rarely think of it.

I find myself thinking: You say you need more love, more money, more accomplishment, more stuff, more recognition, but don't you realize you're going to die any moment now? Do you think you're going to live forever? And what's this cruelty thing, this wish to get ahead of others, this wish to diminish others? And what is this ambition thing, this idea that you are going to “make your mark on the world?”

There are just so many things that I have not understood, because death was so real to me. “Competition,” for instance. It has seemed that almost everyone I knew or heard of thought that “competition” was somehow a good thing. Me, the very idea of competition leaves me cold. You want to get ahead of me, pass me on the highway even at risk of your life? Fine. Be my guest. Drive just as fast as you can and get ahead of me. “Winning is the only thing” or even a good thing was a widely-held belief, although it seemed as false, contemptible or insane as anything could be. The idea of trying to be “better than” someone else was as strange to me as the birds in the garden.

In fact, I still don't get it. I just don't get how being better than, or getting ahead of, someone else could be such a widespread wish. Just thinking of it makes me feel unclean.

Another effect that a high level of Personal Death Awareness, “PDA,” as I've recently heard it called, seems to be an almost constant questioning of what is worth doing and what is not worth doing. “Life is too short for this” or “This is the only thing that really matters” or "This may be the last time I ever get to see this person whom I love so very much" seem to go through my mind more often than I think is usual.

There is an ancient belief that there is a “life review” that happens at the time of our death. It is commonly a part of near-death reports (See Life Review and the Near-Death Experience). One of the most intriguing elements of those reports is that often the things which are seen in the clarity of that review to have been “little” are actually quite big. And what had once seemed to be a big deal is actually quite empty.

My best guess as to what I will be doing during my last moments is that I will be thinking of the people I love.