When knowing it all does not matter
This is an excerpt from my journal. I express the connection with my surroundings and how I do not need all the answers.
Minutes to eleven. Another rainy day comes to a close. I just came back from my nightly hike with the dogs. We walk around the mountains for several hours per day. This is basically paradise for dogs. It is equally benign for me as well. I remain as fit as ever. I always have energy to do what I like. My mental state is stable, my thoughts are clear, my presence focused. The mountains empower me. I forgot how it is to live with perennial stress. Everything is easier when you have a good connection with your environment and your inner world.
There is nothing grand happening. This note describes the present moment, though it also applies to what I was feeling yesterday, and the year before, and, probably what I will experience in the future. Stability sounds boring to someone who is used to trying new things all the time. Though it actually is not. Once you get used to this reality, you develop a finer appreciation of the phenomena. It is a little bit like conditioning yourself to eat unsalted salads: at first it is bland until it eventually becomes a combination of natural flavours that were once obscured by the salt.
I keep treading the same paths. Though I always notice something different. The environment is alive. Every form of life in it is in motion. It is working towards some end. The grass tries to be taller and wider, in order to maximise its exposure to the sun and access to soil plus water. The acorn proceeds towards becoming an oak tree over the course of centuries. Even the land itself is transforming. Every single rainfall takes some hard matter from the higher parts and moves it downstream. Where there was once solid ground one now finds signs of flowing water. In the geological time frame, the earth itself becomes something other than what it was.
I lack the depth of conscience to communicate with the earth the way I do with my dogs or other people. Though I can already sense that it is an organism. I discern the manifestations of life all around me. And I am aware that there are strata of emergence to each phenomenon. What I understand as myself, a unit of human, Protesilaos the one and only, is a system of systems. To describe even a single part of my body, I would need to spend a lifetime studying all the technicalities. I am ignorant about the full extent of knowledge that is embedded in the making of the eye, for example, or the interplay between the brain and the gut. Yet there is a sense in which I know myself. I operate at a certain stratum of emergence. What happens at the strata below or above is not at the centre of my conscious world, although it is a precondition for it.
The reason I am content with the little things is because I have understood that they are actually not insignificant. They are subtle, yes. It is as if they are hiding in plain sight, testing our capacity for mindfulness. Many of the world’s religions promise an escape from this world. I do not resonate with their teachings. I was listening to some monk the other day talk about how suffering is innate to the present experience and how we must not feel moved by what is around us. How so? I feel calm. To be moved is to be, for all presences are in motion. I keep finding reasons to smile: they are all around me.
What I did wish to escape from was the expectation of knowing it all. The idea that there has to be a beginning, middle, and end to this story, and that I should be aware of it. I do not feel entitled to know everything. I do not prey for the universe to conspire in my favour. I do not ask for an opt out clause, some derogation from the rules that govern the mechanics of the system of systems. I love what is and am thankful for what I have for as long as it is beside me on my path.
The gods offer hints but no explanations. We can only work with what we have. Even if they did tell us explicitly, we lack the means to definitively know: are they being truthful or trying to test us? If, for example, Jesus performed all those miracles and got resurrected, those all prove that he did perform these very miracles and did get resurrected. There is nothing in those events, in isolation or in combination, that necessarily proves everything else that Christians claim to know about God: agentic, triadic, benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, ubiquitous. The leap of faith is unavoidable.
We deal with what is germane to the human condition, recognising that it is an amalgamation of joy and sorrow, of enthusiasm and disappointment, of tension and release. We suffer when we are unable to connect with that which is immanent; that which is so close to us at all times; that which we underestimate, take for granted, or altogether ignore. Giving it a name, telling a story about it, is useful insofar as we do not forget that this is an artistic device. We do it for the fun of it, to have something to talk about with other people, and to contribute to the workings of our social reproduction.
God dies in the naming of god, in the framing of it as only one instead of the multitude and the monad, in the stories we take too seriously as we turn them into inflexible doctrines. God is lost once the dogma we impose on our psyche forbids us from reaching out to the source, to the singing spring whose waters always flow.
When I sense the cold rain on my face, as I close my eyes and turn skyward, I find peace in the knowledge that I am not special in my need for water and air. Just as I require them, so do the plants and other animals all around me. This is not merely about surviving, but feeling the connection with that which envelops and underpins me. From my constitutive subsystems to the supersystems I partake in, there is life ever-lasting, ever-transfiguring.
The rainy days will continue until the first third of April. I do not have someone to tell this to, so I am putting it in the present bottle and tossing it to the sea. Not having all the answers does not bother me. I am like that bottled note, moving wherever the current takes me. That there even is an ocean is astonishing. I cannot fathom the full extent of the factors whose interplay contributes to there being an ocean. Can we even draw clear delineations in the cosmic continuum? Is there an in vitro expression of anything to be studied in isolation from totality?
I will go to bed now. Tomorrow morning I will get the chance to continue with my projects around my house. Well, unless there is heavy rainfall. Every yard here contains hours of my labour. Though no matter how much sweat I spill, I can never make the land an extension of myself. It belongs to me just as it belongs to the grass and the insects below of it. We are all together. Admitting as much keeps things in perspective and makes everything simpler.