Thursday, December 18, 2008

Presence

What hope there is in finding someone who reaffirms your most private convictions, your deepest unspoken passions, who has the courage and opportunity and freedom to stand on the rooftops and holler out your personal treatise.  Emerson says, "The young man reveres men of genius because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is."  They're called mentors, heroes.  People who stand up for the things we long to find the courage to stand up for, too.  

            It brings me to that heartbreaking presence/absence binary.  What we humans do is ache for Edenic presence.  We spend our lives trying to find a place where the presence of God is with us again.  We want kinetic communion with Holiness and Divinity.  I think we all know that there is something terribly strange about this condition of ours; the placement of an immortal soul inside of a perishable container – I don’t think we get it.  I know that I don’t. 

            In asking why it is that we are all here, I know that it has to be something we experience in the transcendent moments. Are they enough to justify the whole thing?  And how could an entire existence be created around a few fractions of seconds of “getting it”?  And are there people who never will get it?  Are there people who never will transcend, through fault of their own or not?  I know I have before, and I know I will again.  But what do I do with the rest of my life?  I understand why people renounce the world and become mystics.  I want to be a mystic.  And yet I love the world, and I feel so connected to it.  It is a part of me. 

            Mom was explaining a most basic concept of string theory to me last night.  Scientists can tell that there are particles even smaller than the nuclei of atoms.  There is something that we cannot see that strings together little bits of matter, tiny yet inextricably bonded ropes of energy that flow and move together – connected. 

            There is something basic and abstract in me that understands this synaptic chord.  I get it.  The strings in my molecular makeup are somehow able to communicate to me their perfection.  I hear a song they make that regulates the beat I move to.  Because all things, in all their mass and weight, rest on these tiny threads – wrongness doesn’t really register with me.  For this, I do not recoil from cruelty when I walk with it, nor am I confounded by injustice.  We are all certainly woundable, but only when the world’s conflict with the strings surpasses my own understanding of them.  

There is a hero in my life who sees the world just like this.  In a way, I see this person as my own potential fully realized.  It makes me worry that I will never be like him - that I'll get in my own way and throw stumbling blocks in my own path.  This is why I tremble with frustration that I do not know which career to pursue.  I wonder if it will ever take a linear form.  Will it be chaotic?  I hope not.  I am not a chaotic person.  I want to meet with success but so much more than that I want to be fulfilled.  I want to do something with my life that involves presence.  I want to move one step closer to the center, to do something new and different that has never been done before.  And I am slowly freeing myself from obsession with magnitude – it can be small.  Nobody else even has to know about it.  I ache for presence.