“When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul.” Lady Gaga
I just finished Cool Machine, the last book of a trilogy by Colson Whitehead about Harlem in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Toward the end of the last chapter of the last book, Whitehead says, “Fresh air was nice, but so was the other stuff. Noise, dirt, and struggle.” He raises the question, where do you go if you leave New York? – There is no place else besides New York City.”
Sometimes, I feel the same. Having lived in New York and New Jersey for 36 years (1980 to 2016), I often miss the vibrancy and diversity now that we live in a very white and quiet town in Northwestern Michigan. And yet, overall, I prefer Michigan to mishigas—a Yiddish term that means craziness, madness, frenzy and chaos. At 81, I have come to value the peaceful and calm comfort of a small Midwest town. And there is something to be said about returning to your roots.
Last week, however, we returned to New York to see my daughter deliver a sermon on Origin Stories: Becoming Who we Are at the All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan. She started with a poem by Joy Harjo and ended by singing a Hebrew Prayer from Isaiah. It was a very moving service, and I left thinking, “What a way to live your life—start with a poem and end with a song.”
In my morning meditation, I find my quiet reflection a soothing way to start the day by cleansing all the dirt, debris, and noise from my head and heart, clarifying who I want to become in the days remaining in my life, and choosing who I want to be in the day I have been given. I begin by emptying my mind and body of whatever distracting thoughts, feelings, and tensions I may be carrying.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau retreats to the woods not to escape society entirely but to strip away the “mishigas”—the unnecessary clutter, social posturing, and endless static of mid-19th-century life. Thoreau recognized that before a person can see clearly, they must wash away the accumulated grit of daily survival. In my early morning practice, sitting in silence acts as that necessary rinsing and releasing. It isn’t a rejection of the vibrant “noise, dirt, and struggle” Whitehead writes about in Cool Machine; rather, it is a way to quiet the external chaos so my inner being can finally settle and breathe—to return to its original state. It seems to me that life has become much more complicated today than it may have been in Walden’s 19th century or even Colson’s 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s.
As I continue to meditate, once the waters are still (or a little less choppy), reflection turns to purpose. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius constantly reminded himself to cut through all the illusions of life and align with what truly matters. He wrote to clarify his own mind—to distinguish between fleeting distractions and enduring principles. For me, sitting in the morning calm brings a similar clarity. It brings into focus who I want to become in the time I have remaining, filtering out the trivial, the terrifying and the tragic to honor what holds true meaning: family, presence, and purpose. My goal is to find clarity not with labels but with feelings and purpose.
In a fascinating NYT article this morning by a child psychiatrist Dr. Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, she cites research revealing that words and labels are often a coping mechanism, an effort to find some accepted narrative in which to understand one’s very personal pain. She has found that more and more young women and girls are self-diagnosing with therapeutic labels to help make sense of their worlds. She suggests that they would benefit by focusing on their feelings and their personal purpose instead of fixating and/or hiding behind a diagnostic label. In any event, getting clear about who we are and who we are becoming seems like a worthy effort.
Finally, clarification must yield to action. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl presents a fundamental truth of human existence: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” While we cannot control the pace of the world, the geography we inhabit, the conditions in which we live, or the passage of years, we retain the power of choice each morning. We choose how we show up for ourselves and for those around us.
In my previous two posts, I wrestled with the conditions we are living in now and the skills required to navigate those conditions. This post completes my own trilogy of the facts of life and why it is important to focus on and commit to transformation and transcendence in our lives. I don’t pretend to compare my trilogy of short posts to Colson Whitehead’s trilogy of three epic books, but it is my humble attempt to frame what life might look like at this point in history. Here’s a chart that summarizes those themes around the acronym (FACT).
|
Conditions (F’s) |
Skills (A’s) |
Processes. (C’s) |
Outcomes (T’s) |
|
Folly |
Acknowledgement |
Cleanse |
Truth |
|
Foolery |
Attribution |
Clarify |
Trust |
|
Fantasy |
Accountability |
Choose |
Transparency |
Ohh, if only the results of our individual and collective efforts resulted in more truth, trust, and transparency.
Like my daughter’s sermon, which bridged the raw honesty of Joy Harjo’s poetry with the transcendent hope of an ancient Hebrew prayer, our daily lives ask us to integrate both the noise and the stillness. We cleanse the spirit, clarify the path, and then step forward into the day we have been given—choosing to start with a poem and end with a song. May it be so.
