May 7, 2006

• a surprising surprise

  I stepped out the door recently and was surprised to see how much bare
  ground is showing between the receding patches of dirty snow. 
  Upon a moment’s reflection, I was surprised and chagrined that such a
  commonplace result of seasonal progression took me by surprise. 
  It happens every year around this time.

  I don’t know if my failure to anticipate the snow’s disappearance means
  I have been making progress at transcending my expectations, or if it
  only means I haven’t been paying attention.  There could be a bit
  of both those things going on here.  There could even be some
  sneaky pessimistic expectations there, the unconscious feeling that
  winter would never end.

  That set me to thinking about pessimism and optimism, and about
  attention and presence.  Optimism and pessimism are philosophies
  that have troubled me in this life.  At some point in my
  adolescence, I decided that pessimism was the way to go because that
  way if I got a surprise, it would be a pleasant one.  I’d had
  enough nasty surprises, thank you very much.

  A little later on, after life had taught me about self-fulfilling
  prophecies, and about the way people tend to live up or down to what we
  expect of them, I swung over to optimism, a natural enough move for
  someone with Moon, Venus, Mars, Neptune and a couple of asteroids in
  Libra.  It was relatively recently that I decided to ditch my
  expectations and live in the Now.

  The first question a Virgo will ask about “the Now” is, “Just how long
  is this Now moment?”  The answer I (the Virgo in question, with
  Sun, Mercury, Jupiter, Chiron, some asteroids — just about everything
  not in Libra — in Virgo) derived was, “It’s all NOW.”  That’s the
  only answer that makes any sense at all.  If “now” has any
  meaning, it must be all-encompassing and of infinite duration, or it
  must be infinitesimal and exclusive of all time except for that
  gone-before-we-know-it instant.

  The latter seems absurd on the face of it and if true would make
  nonsense of memory, history, cause-and-effect, and all the laws of
  physics.  “Now,” now that I’ve had time to think about it, is a
  stretchy concept, just as is time itself.  Clock-time, in its
  mechanical regularity, just does not seem real to me.  Years can
  be fleeting and seconds can last long enough to do many hours worth of
  thinking or feeling.  It’s all now to me.

  But, then again, it’s quite a personal stretch to be present and paying
  attention in all-time all at the same time, so maybe this “I” thing is
  just traveling through it all in a stretchy little now-bubble just
  extensive enough to encompass my attention.  Yeah, I guess that
  works for me.  Now, I think I’ll just let that little attention
  bubble float away.
  

  • 4:23 pm
  • 2 Comments