Dear Diary: Health & Wisdom
So far, this week has been what last week was not: quiet and uneventful. For me, that is. For Will, today marked a milestone: his first day of school. Megan went back to work; it was twelve weeks ago today that she went to the hospital for a test/checkup of some kind — and, what with one thing and another, she stayed. When she left the hospital a few days later, she was a mother.
Megan feels very, very good about the day care arrangement that she has been lucky enough to make, and that is really all that one can ask on behalf of a conscientious mom. Will passed the day surrounded by older children (most if not all of them in diapers just as he was) and appeared to undergo a developmental boost as a result. I’m told that I won’t recognize him when I see him next. I expect that I shall. Through all the hurdles that he has cleared so far, he has always seemed to be the same little man, only with more moving parts. As he grows, he becomes more complexly himself.
I have come to a conclusion that I should have rejected out of hand (and not without foot stamping) when I was young: we become ourselves more quickly if we just let it happen. Being and becoming take care of themselves. What we need to attend to is doing. Oh, how I should have hated this advice! Like many Americans, I was certain that, “somewhere deep inside,” there lay a highly polished version of myself, imprisoned in the darkness, in chains as it were, and that my most important task was to discover it and “set it free.” To fail at this mission would be to live a second-rate life of grey disappointment. To which I now say: poppycock.
Correspondingly, I believed that defining yourself by your deeds was vulgar, betraying a slavish and dim-witted regard for merit badges. Here, at least, I was closer to sound thinking. It is vain indeed to expect a string of accomplishments to make sense of life — something that we should apprehend more readily if, like the French, we treated “achievement” more ambiguously, and infused it with a sense of absolute termination (death). To complete something is to lose it forever. It’s not the deed, but the doing.
When I say that I wish I were writing more for Portico, I don’t mean that I’d like to produce a higher number of pages per time period. What I’d like is to have a routine more conducive to the turning out of pages on all the things that interest me, one after the other. The transmutation of experience into language is pretty much what I’m all about, to the extent that I’m more than a generic human being, and I’d like to spend more time at it. It’s not that I lack the discipline to sit down and write. What I lack is the intellectual suppleness to think broadly and comprehensively after spending two or three hours every morning reviewing hundreds of Google Reader feeds for the Daily Office. I’ll get there. But getting there will be the beginning of a project, not the end of one.
Who cares about me, though. If a reliable angel were to assure me that I could bequeath everything that I have learned in the past couple of years to my grandson, in a form that would be useful and helpful to him, I’d take to my deathbed straightaway. Anything for the boy’s health and wisdom.Â