Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real. (David Foster Wallace)

The above quote, from my last post, is the essence of the “spinning” that occurs with a fish that cannot see its water. However, a “fish” can learn to see water and my life is a story about this accomplishment.  Actually, I must confess this has not been an “accomplishment” as I was born this way and it has merely taken me half a century to find the confidence to accept and honor this lot in life.  My confidence was buoyed last year when I read…twice…the Booker-Prize winning novel by Anna Burns, “The Milkman” in which she introduced me to the notion of living “beyond the pale.” In my life beyond this pale…and yes it is the “pale” separating reality and something “beyond”…which I’m increasingly learning is not a catastrophe but is merely the endowment of what poet John Keats called “negative capability.”  (It could, though be a “catastrophe” and often is!) This stance has blessed/cursed me with the “observer” stance which Emily Dickinson alluded to when she noted, “Life is over there, on a shelf.”  It is no coincidence that Dickinson spent her life “cloistered” in her father’s attic and I myself have spent my life “cloistered” in some attic, some cerebral detachment of sorts.

But in this cloister of mine I have not escaped the predicament the David Foster Wallace noted in the quote provided above.  I, too, offer but a “spin” about the world and I, too, have tended to take it too seriously and demonstrated too often a tendency to impose it on others; as some wit noted, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail.”  The ego has a difficult time ever acknowledging its machinations which are intrinsically a “spin” about the world and an attempt to make it wholly about itself.  When Humility begins to penetrate that hermetically-sealed chamber, the “spin” begins to rattle against the walls of the cage it has created and great is the “noise” to the owner of the ego…and sometimes to those looking on from the outside!

Let me close with a note about the “noise” which is clamoring in our modern world as our collective ego is under a related grave challenge.  Particularly in my country, the basic assumptions, the premises, the “water” that we “fish” cannot see, is being exposed.  In this situation, the part of our culture which most embodies this obfuscation is clinging obstinately to its ego and have found a leader who champions so vividly its cause.

In my next post, I am going to share about the “spinning” of one’s religious tradition and how that noble teachings can become merely an example of the aforementioned “kid with a hammer.”