Something Peculiar To This Day Alone
I had the experience Saturday of feeling poisoned by despair over the back to work protests which put our great divide in America in a blinding spotlight. Parlous, it seemed, soulless, leaderless, lacking the vision without which we perish. Being an American has never felt worse to me, though I may be forgetting how the Vietnam and Watergate years were. I experienced those as a callow youth and doubtless I’m different now.
This was a place beyond tears. They at least would have felt better, offered some release. I was lost in rank weeds, a mephitic cave or swamp, a noxious place, a place poisonous to spirit. And I kept linking to more articles, like I’d been taken over by an alien force. It was like stepping in a huge pile of dog shit and having it in every tread.
I couldn’t seem to stop. Sometimes I can easily put the laptop away or turn off the radio. “Just trying to know what’s going on,” I say, or “Working hard to see another point view.” But I hadn’t bound myself to the mast beforehand. Or maybe I had, by being with a woman who rescued me as if waking me up from a terrible dream, bidding me come to dinner.
Lost to me were Lincoln’s words about binding the nation’s wounds and having malice toward none. Gone were Walt Whitman hearing America singing and Emma Lazarus’s “give me your tired, your poor.” Not gonna happen said my fearful self. When in that kind of spiritual place, it feels awful to be an American right now. Adrift, no compass, no direction home, like a rolling stone.
The solution is as simple as hand washing, of course, so simple you almost want to argue.
Stop doing that.
You’re almost resentful, wanting it to be more complicated. “I can handle the news, no problem” or “Our bodies have an immune system to fend off germs, no need to go crazy here.” I didn’t read or listen to one “important update” all day yesterday and a blessed relief it was. I reached back into my aikido years and read George Leonard instead.
In The Way of Aikido, the great writer and sensei notes, “It could be said that the health of an individual or an organization is generally directly proportionate to the number of perceived options at its command. The converse is also true. When an individual or an organization moves toward breakdown, that move is generally accompanied by the perception of fewer and fewer options. Isn’t it strange, then, that when we’re being pushed, we’ve limited ourselves to a response that results in only three options, none of them particularly good?”
If you’re like most people, Leonard notes, when pushed, you’re quite likely to push back verbally or psychologically. “So let’s see what options you have, what outcomes you can expect, in case you do. It’s simple: you can win, you can lose, or there could be a stalemate–none of which is conducive to harmony and mutual satisfaction.” He goes on to explain about the art of blending in aikido and how to practice it outside a dojo in the real world. I felt some hope again for what’s possible.
Interestingly, the Spanish word of the day that came in my email was esperar (to hope), which dovetailed nicely with these words from poet Jessica Powers. “There will be something, anguish or elation, that is peculiar to this day alone. I rise from sleep and say: Hail to the morning! Come down to me, my beautiful unknown.”
