Beauty and Uncertainty

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me." -- Richard Feynman, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out." (Full text of the interview)

You Are Already That Which You Seek

Today I turn forty one, which was supposed to mark the end of this year-long spiritual quest. It's been a good run, folks. A crazy year. Beginning with stability. Ending in turmoil. One marathon down. One new job on the horizon. One less appendix. Twelve fewer months on the ticking clock. I've learned a ton, had some great experiences, enjoyed precious time with my wife and children, developed some new connections, written some new songs, dreamed some new dreams.

But I've got to be honest with you. In terms of ultimate answers, I've got nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

To anyone with a shred of self-awareness and wisdom, this should come as no surprise, like it was to me. I'm actually okay with it now. More than okay. The lack of answers gives me tremendous relief, a heightened awareness of the preciousness of my own life. One might even call it a sense of enlightenment.

This isn't for lack of trying. In fact, all the striving for meaning seems to have had the opposite effect. Digging a deeper hole and consistently coming up empty, the disappointment always increasing with the depth. I searched, pondered and prayed. I meditated and yoga-ed, attended churches and Buddhist temples. I read like a man on fire, starting with Lao Tzu, ending with Shakespeare. I tried to build structural dams--programs, schedules, goals--to contain and harness the free-flowing river of my life. But they didn't hold.

And now I'm staring at another twelve months, another forty-four years (if I'm lucky), with less hope for answers than I had a year ago. But also one less question.

In a great and wholly predictable irony, I have found that in the quest for meaning and purpose after Mormonism, there is none to be found, not in any ultimate sense. So time to stop asking the question. It's sort of like asking what happened before the Big Bang. To ask the question is to fundamentally misunderstand the material.

This doesn't mean that life is meaningless. Au contraire. I feel that my life is profoundly meaningful, in an entirely subjective way. But in the ultimate sense, it is not. Or if there is ultimate purpose, it is ultimately unknowable, and therefore irrelevant. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

More succinctly put: "The meaning of life is to give life meaning." Maybe the most important part of that lovely turn of phrase is the period at the end. No caveats. No afterlife to make sense of it all. No man in the sky (or on Kolob, as the case may be) to correct your error, speak truth as with the voice of thunder, or judge the quality of your life.

Give your life a meaning, and that shall be the meaning of your life. Thus saith the Lord, whoever you conceive that to be.

This actually gives me more empathy towards Mormonism and other religions. They are systems of values and meaning. They work for a lot of people, bringing them happiness, stability and community. They may be completely incongruent with reality, but what is reality? We all see it through the glass darkly. And if the dark glass you're looking through is religion, and if it's working for you, then great. Don't rock that boat. I remember the old dream of "dying with your testimony intact and your eternal salvation assured." Seemed like a good idea at the time. That sense of certainty is a tough thing to let go of. It's a long hard fall from there.

(The rub is when you discover that your system of values is incongruent with reality AND causes harm to other people. In a truthful and just society, that should prompt a recalibration. But that's a discussion for another day . . .)

I do believe that most everyone is doing the best they can to see accurately through the glass they've been given. But for many, that glass will one day break, the walls will collapse, and you will be forced to confront a new paradigm of reality. You will be cast out of the garden of Eden and must enter the lone and dreary world. Now, with enhanced metaphorical power, you will be separated from what you believed to be God, and must find your way back through mists of darkness towards the Tree of Life. But upon arrival, you may find that tree, even the wilderness you are traversing, is just another pane in another stain glass wall, like all those others broken behind you.

And so it goes. We frustrate ourselves by breaking glass wall after glass wall, never arriving at the center of the maze. I guess that's okay. Gives us something to do. But maybe sometimes--due to a prick of conscience, a life experience, sheer boredom--we become inclined, for a brief moment, to stop the mad striving. In that place of respite, once our breath stops fogging the glass, we see the wall for what it is. And then maybe, instead of breaking it, we pause, stop looking beyond it, and finally see ourselves reflected.

Thus shall I bringeth this to a close. In spite of all I've just written, this quest is not going away, neither the blog. (Sorry.) With all of these epiphanies also comes a measure of self-awareness, and there is simply something hardwired within me that must strive. I am a seeker, and a quintessential American. The rugged western individualist who must bend the world to his will. Always going, never arriving, but still blogging about it, and newly unburdened by the nagging sense that there is still a holy grail somewhere from which I must drink.

I can think of no better way to close this year's spiritual questing than with the words of that spiritual giant, the great Eminem, who once said, "I can't tell you what it really is / I can only tell you what it feels like / And right now it's a steel knife in my wind pipe / I can't breathe but I still fight while I can fight." Or more pertinently, "Look, if you had one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted, in one moment, would you capture it? Or just let it slip."

Listen to what Eminem is teaching us: Lose yourself . . . to find yourself. 

Or what so many other sages throughout time have concluded:

• The road ends where the sky begins.
• The course of the Lord is one eternal round.
• Now is forever. Forever is now.
• The kingdom of God is within you.
• You are already that which you seek.

And while I'm not labeling myself anything particular, here's a bunch of humanist/atheist folks who share this central insight much more eloquently than me.

And here's a link to my first post a year ago, a preamble, which strangely makes today's post seem more like a reformulation. I am glad to have written what I've written this year. It's my journey. These have been some of the way stations. I'm hopeful someone somewhere got some benefit.

I think all of this--these few paragraphs today, these last twelve months--has been a way of saying something that, in the end, nobody else cares about. Not really.

But I care, so I'll say it. Hey, Mark Elliott Foster and anyone else out there of like mind and spirit in this incomprehensibly vast and beautiful universe, welcome to uncertainty.

Appendicitis and the Narrowed Clarity of Purpose

This past Thursday, at the stroke of midnight on our sixteenth wedding anniversary, I awoke from surgery, cleared the anesthetic cobwebs, and was overcome by one singular sweet sensation that flooded my mind as both a thought and a feeling: the pain was gone. That awareness, the exquisiteness of that recognition of relief, brought a sudden halting laugh and a few tears along with it, thus announcing to the battle-hardened PACU nurse that I was indeed alive and well, and rather loopy.

It wasn't just the drugs--though I had some good ones on board by then that I'm sure obliterated any residual pain and augmented my loopiness. But between closing my eyes in the OR and opening them an instant (actually forty-five minutes) later, the poison had been removed. My festering appendix that had reduced me to a moaning quivering shell of a man was gone, surgerized by the expert Dr. Quan and her staff. With the appendix gone, so was my pain.

And my next thought was even more sweet: where's Elizabeth? She had suffered with me, staying by my bedside on a most unromantic evening for a good seven hours while I waited for surgery, a bright angel on a dark night. I just wanted to hold her hand again. Happy anniversary, sweetheart.

I don't mean to present my appendicitis as some sort of true catastrophe. No, in the big scheme, this is small potatoes. (Actually, about the size of a green bean, a vestigial hollow piece of colon attached like a stalk at the base of the cecum.) It's a common condition and a safe surgical procedure, done laparoscopically so all I'm left with are three pencil-width wounds on my belly. Five days later and I'm feeling almost back to normal. I'll be back at work tomorrow.

But in the context of my normal life, the timing and setting could hardly have been worse or more dramatic. The pain was as severe and unrelenting as anything I've ever experienced, so I'm going to call it a mini-catastrophe. And within this mini-catastrophe, something surprising but altogether welcome occurred: a swirling vortex of impending and seemingly weighty life decisions and their accompanying angst just drifted away.

Without going into details, I've had a stressful few weeks concerning the future of my clinic and my career. This is my prime excuse for not writing recently, for not expounding upon this quixotic spiritual quest I embarked on nearly twelve months ago. (I know, you've been biting your fingernails waiting for the next installment.) But I've had no available bandwidth to engage deeper existential questions. On the spiritual spiral, I've of late regressed into contemplating more mundane problems, namely, how am I going to steer my career, chase my dreams, and still put food on the table. (Or last Thursday night, how am I going to get some dang pain relief?) I haven't been sleeping well, feeling on edge, flailing in the uncertainty of it all, which perhaps suppressed my immune system and allowed the appendicitis to develop . . . ? Nah, I've had way more stressful times in which the appendix held up just fine. I think in the end this was a random lightning strike, no matter what meaning I might attribute to it. But the fact is that this event did occur, most strangely, at a time of heightened anxieties, and what feels like a crossroads.

But suddenly none of that mattered. Well, not suddenly. I had woken up Thursday morning after a nearly sleepless night due to a) worry and b) what I thought was indigestion. Dull ache right around my belly button. Greasy hamburger the night before. No big deal. I was consumed with thoughts about my clinic and staff. But as the morning progressed, so did the belly pain. Maybe just constipation? I thought it would fade. I was still hoping to pull off the romantic anniversary trip that I had planned for Elizabeth, which unceremoniously ended thirty minutes after checking into the hotel, when I found myself laying on the floor next to the toilet, moaning, dizzy, feverish, nauseous, strong indications that a) this was more than just constipation, and b) our impending couple's massage was not going to happen. I pushed on my right lower abdomen. Yowzers! So that's McBurneys! At this point, any halfwit second year medical student could have made the diagnosis. My wife explained the situation to the hotel manager, who graciously offered us a raincheck, and we headed to the ER, a torturous twenty minute stop-and-go ride hitting every possible bump through rush hour traffic on the way to Swedish Hospital.

By the time we got there, my pain had crescendoed. I staggered into the waiting room, barely able to compose a complete sentence to the completely unimpressed triage lady. "Why are you here?" Uh-uh-abdominal pain. "On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain, ten being the worst pain imaginable?" (At this point, a Brian Regan skit came to mind.) Eight. No, no . . . nine.

Before long, I was in a room with the IV running, pain meds on board, but still writhing in pain. My incredible primary doctor and friend, Dr. Groce, came personally to the hospital to deliver the news. White blood cells, 16.8. CT scan positive showed a fecolith, fat stranding, and dilated appendix. I met the nice surgeon, Dr. Quan who would soon ride to the rescue, but . . . it was going to be another six hours before an OR suite became available. I would be moved to a room upstairs and brought back down to pre-op in about five hours.

This was most disappointing news ever. In spite of powerful meds, my pain had actually gotten worse, and now seemed inescapable. They gave me another and then another dose of potent narcotics. I became somewhat sedated, but still with the awareness of this bone-deep ache in my belly that hurt with the slightest movement. There was a poison wreaking havoc inside of me that nothing could mask. In all seriousness, in that extremis, death did not seem an unpleasant alternative. I gripped Elizabeth's hand, and began counting down the hours. Absolutely nothing else mattered to me. The operating system of my brain had frozen on the word PAIN. I had regressed all the way down the spiral, my brain a ball of red hot neurons. I was white-knuckling it and just hoping to outlast the pain until relief came.

And then . . . I was whisked to the OR, closing my eyes and quite literally before I knew it (so weird how anesthesia renders the passage of time instantaneous) I was awakening to that most glorious, definitive relief of pain. Hallelujah. Cue the laughter and tears.

We have friends, Megan and Rick, whose home burnt down this week. (Here is a website where you can help their recovery.) I was speaking this weekend with Megan's mother, who relayed to me that two nights after the fire (coincidentally on the same night as my appendectomy), Megan and her kids celebrated Rick's birthday in a hotel room, newly aware that everything--photos, clothes, appliances--in the home had been destroyed and that their family would be displaced for at least six months. And yet as they ate birthday cake while sitting on the floor, they looked at each other and began to cry, but tears of relief. They had lost everything, and yet they had everything--each other, their kids, their dog, their health, their lives. Everything of value. Everything they needed. Their community had reached out to them in love and relief. They would survive this Catastrophe (this one with a capital C.)

As she shared this story, it resonated acutely with me. I've just experienced a similar unexpected life simplification, induced by a mini-catastrophe. I'll call this disruptive epiphany the Narrowed Clarity of Purpose.

All this other stuff that has seemed so weighty? The job negotiations? The search for meaning and purpose? So first-world. I'm honestly grateful for this experience, for the brief respite it has provided in my ongoing mental and spiritual exertions, for placing in sharp relief what matters most. I've got a wife and children I love. I'm going to have a job. Food will be put on the table. (No greasy burgers for a while, just to be safe.) Life is good, and in a way that has much more meaning than a week ago, I'm pain-free. What a relief. I'm also appendix-free. One less thing to worry about.

Though there's always the gall bladder . . .

The Perfect Skipper

(a relevant, refurbished original poem about anticipation, disappointment, and resilience)

The wilderness traveler
happened upon the stone
and stooping seized it so to skim
out over the slow bend in the river.

The canyon walls were growing dim.
The blue stripe of sky had kept
for a day's time the cirrus clouds bound,
but now they ignited and burned
rose and apricot into their native chalk tone,
and seemed to unravel, or
suddenly grow fonder of infiniti and forever,
for without so much as a sound
they surrendered to the loftiest winds and dissipated.

Out along the river he merrily stepped,
and in his hand the thin flat rock turned.
Such a skipper as this,
he anticipated,
seven or eight times might kiss
the green and silver surface
yet still reach
the purple shale slides strewn
along the opposite beach.
And if on impact it should splinter?
Well, then--
it will have fulfilled its purpose.
He grinned,
cradled then gripped
his perfect skipper--
and with precision let it fly.

The downstream rapid's din
nearly disguised the kerplunk.
It skipped
not once, and then it was sunk.

Were it winter,
even late autumn,
it might have skated across like a hockey puck.
But swollen with the melted waters of June,
the green river bend
offered no such luck.
It absorbed the stone like a coin,
conducing it to join
its rolling gravel at the bottom.

For a long time he stared where the stone had gone.
It's just as well, he thought,
then looked to the deepening night sky,
taunting with its iridescent Dipper.

He spat, ambled on,
and soon forgot.