Wisdom in Memory June, 2004
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
To a Mouse, Robert Burns
We act, behave, relate and build up experiences, hoping we’ll be looking back on them with pleasure. Sometimes though it’s with distaste, or something somewhere in between. The wiser we get the more we can attune or adjust our actions, knowing ourselves well enough and how we will look back on what we did. Maybe that’s why the lucky ones fill their lives with pleasantly safe experiences which may not necessarily be all that wonderful at the time because of the raw collision of the state of being human coming into contact with the experience. It matters not so much what the event or the object, but more who you are and what you bring to the moment.
It might not have been perfect and comfortable and maybe you weren’t totally skin-happy, but if you made the effort, if you did something different, saw something new, felt something good, then surely the memory is more likely to be golden. The chances are that the memory will be good because our minds work that way. We remember the past in a better light, looking back is rosier from the future. And memory is everything when you get to a certain age. If you doubt it, just look at hundreds of great writers recalling their memories in literature. Realise that what you do, really do, with all your heart and soul in the present, that is what you’ll recall later, and that will form a raison d’être or a foundation for life. That’s wisdom, mon ami! The clearer your state of being in the present as you act, the clearer and happier your memory will be. You enhance your future thinking by behaving well in the present.
Even more wisdom is to do with accepting how you feel in the present, which often may not be as happy and perfect as you would wish it, but equally often the memory of it will be pleasant, given certain conditions of a positive outlook and a facility for recalling only the good times. How many people have you heard saying something like it’s good to remember the good times? Maybe part of the human condition is we’re hard-wired to recall a positive past, to eliminate the dross, or at best play it down. There’s a better life, a better present that way. Fortunately, life is often rosier in retrospect.
We shouldn’t shut out the past, and anyway the way our psyches and memories work, much of it is remembered. Some of the bad stuff isn’t much fun, but wise ones learn from past experience, knowing that if we ignore history, we’re doomed to repeat it. “I won’t make the same mistake again” is both common and helpful.
Telling about the past, the poet A.E. Housman wrote, “Those blue remembered hills” from “A Shropshire Lad”.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
The poet, Philip Larkin wrote that the past and the future “link us to our losses”. Looking back to the distant past and thinking of what’s to come can be disappointing, we don’t handle it well. There has to be a more positive way though, one which concentrates on good memories and possibilities, the former possibly bringing joy, the latter helping us aspire to greater things. My mother had that facility, no dwelling or regretting for her! And she encouraged me out of anything like that.
Loss brings up powerful memories. We think much more kindly of the object of loss than when the person or creature was with us. This has something to do with the difficulties in being human and relating. It’s as if the present is a hard reality which impinges on how our beings, or our existence and consciousness are full of distracting thoughts and feelings vying for attention in our relationships. When someone dies we have many memories, we invariably wish that the lost could be found again. We are sharply aware that someone or something has gone, never to be repeated, only served by memory now, only recalled hopefully with happiness. We are also aware that our turn will come, that those who have gone have had their time, and we were enhanced by knowing them. Connection is all in the keenness of recall. The more we have to remember, the more we will feel the loss. And it’s precisely that feeling which colours everything. Just thinking of what we did or didn’t do, what we would do differently if we had the chance again, is probably not wisdom in action. We fail to acknowledge the impossible enough, and certainly forget that at the time we had to deal with all the annoying things too. We did our best in a present full of distractions.
Larkin wrote in “Reference Back” “as if by acting differently we could have kept it so”, meaning keeping the past as it was, not lessened by the passing of time, by our memory of it. Perhaps we wish that we had acted differently with a loved one, forgetting that it was impossible at the time, given the frailties of the human condition, the swirl of life and events. My partner’s mother, Elena was ill for the last five years of her life. Those were trying times for her daughter who visited Elena every day she was in her resthome, a 15-minute drive. Her other daughter, Sarah juggled work in a distant city, flying many times to see her mother. My partner eight years after her mother’s death still chides herself for not behaving better, for not doing more, for not being with her when she died, even for not being able naturally to grieve her passing, which I’m not sure is always a given for everyone. We forget how difficult it is to achieve perfection in living at the time of some event, as if that way really mattered, so hard to manage all the stuff in the present..
It could be that the Zen practioners are on to something when they practise noticing every movement, every thought, every feeling right now, encased in their being, long practice exercised in silence and ritual. I once observed a monk on a subway train in Tokyo. I think he was a Shinto monk, judging by his rich brocaded garb, probably on his way to a wedding or some other happy ceremony. He sat staring down in total stillness, although all around him there was clatter, colour, movement and people, all the distracting features that the rest of us are happy to be involved with. Now as I write this, I think not for the first time, how enveloped Japanese people are in general, they keep their attention to themselves. The Shinto monk was just a concentration or more advanced form of a natural state. It’s entirely possible that Japanese people have more of an inner life than others, something to do with the value they place on calmness, reserve and reflection. The train monk – indeed probably well trained! – certainly exuded all these qualities as an oasis of stillness amid the clamour, as if he saw everything around him as an illusion, his inner life the only reality. It was as if he needed nothing more than himself, just sitting there, total self-sufficiency. I would not be surprised if his richness of being could deal well with the past and the future and all the linking to our losses. Zen monks and their ilk know that the practice of observation of the mind is thinking in the future of the past, as they accept such past thinking in the present as forming the future, too, as they dwell on being here and now, letting thoughts easily come and go without judgement.
We are our present, future and our past, our past created by the future. There’s a wisdom in memory used like that. The trick is to unravel and then weave the strands of memory, injecting the present feeling into an artistic whole, especially if you’re a writer. That’ll be a modus vivendi if you’re an ordinary mortal! We exist encasing three elements: thinking of the past, negotiating the present and hoping for the future. There’s a fourth element, the influence of the past and the future on the present. If we go on thinking like this there’ll probably be a fifth and sixth.
Acting in such ways as to fend off future regret has always been part of how I try to live. Not very spontaneous or natural perhaps, but for some people regret bites hard. I’ve learned to deal with mine, to feel into it each time a regret arises, to speak to it, and tell myself that I couldn’t have done differently at the time because that’s who I was in those circumstances, which are easy to forget as you focus on the regrettable action and wish you had behaved differently. I’m sure that some other people have no regrets, such is the thickness of the skin or their having found a positive attitude to everything.
Wanting to be somewhere else, anywhere but where you are, is a common antidote to not feeling all right. If I could just be back home, if I could be elsewhere, if I could be with friends. If, if, if … then things would be better, I would feel better. I wonder though as one matures and / or practises being here in the present, if it’s possible to reach a state of being able to think about elsewhere happily without desire, able to imagine you are with friends without wishing for it. You are happy now with a powerful imagination.
Still, being in the present, behaving well in the present and enjoying the moment fully is different to thinking about a future when your present may be different. A common expression is, “Things will be great in a few months after I’ve done such and such.” Then there is thinking back to what you did or didn’t do.
Just being here and now with little future or past distraction is the aim of spiritual questers. And yet I constantly ask the question isn’t it all here and now in your being this moment? What you think and feel, no matter the content, you are you this instant, so be with it all, there is nothing else, be thankful you are able to think and be. Many people cannot be with themselves easily, they have unsettling thoughts and hellish feelings, through no fault of their own, just the bad luck of a poor upbringing. Being here and now is most certainly predicated on being in charge of the faculties, being lucky enough to be able to think and be with equanimity. I’ve known people who have understood and wanted the benefits from meditation or whatever self-improvement way is chosen but they can’t do it. I had a friend a long time ago learned to meditate, I think it was TM but he couldn’t stay awake, so he soon gave up. The intention or desire was there. Not everyone can put in the work necessary for self-improvement or change. It takes effort to find a technique that suits. Apart from which maybe my friend was already there, or here rather, without knowing it. As Maharishi used to say about being one with everything, “It’s from here to here and from there to there.” Maybe he knew a thing or two about thinking back and forward.
Perhaps something drastic like Alzheimer’s is a rescue or relief for people not so happy with what they’ve done or not done in life, but find themselves living long. At the time of writing President Reagan is still around, at least in the body. I don’t think people with that kind of illness are conscious of very much. I hope not. Maybe Google will prove me wrong!
Is there another trick to handling the past? Is there a way of shrugging it off? Maybe one way is to accept your mistake or the thing that worries you, especially if it involves other people, and simply say I’m imagining all this, let it go, no-one is concerned about it, so why should I be? Well, fine, but it takes a great deal of mental strength for that to work. You can tie yourself in knots. Again I think of the Zen practitioners in the present watching the action now, and so absorbed are they in that watching that they can’t notice, don’t need to notice that it has passed, and of course there’s no future because they’re absorbed with themselves putting on the rice, cutting the vegetables, boiling the soy beans or picking up food with chopsticks. I’m reminded of Colette’s constant exhortation, “Just look!” It was her dying words!
Annie Besant and her Theosophy beliefs spring to mind on this point. She espoused a way of operating whereby one channelled a positive thought right after a negative, using the same route to the nervous system opened up by the negative, hitching a ride as it were, but then taking over. I have found when I remember to try something like that, turning the negative around and giving it a different face to regard it more positively, then the object or cause of disappointment starts to dissolve. If you’re lucky of course. It’s not an easy thing making it work.
There’s a fine song from way back.
Re-mem-mem
Re-mem-mem-mem-ber
Re-mem-mem
Re-mem-mem-mem-ber
Re-mem-mem
Re-mem-mem-mem-ber
Then, then, remember then
Whoa, oh, oh…
That night we fell in love
Beneath the stars above
That was a lovely summer night
Remember then, then
Then, then, then …
(From “Remember Then” (1963), sung by The Earls, written by Beverly Ross / Stan Vincent / Tony Powers)
We remember best from a good present. You have to be in a good state to receive and digest experience, to reflect upon it, especially if it is demanding and perhaps contrary to your views of the world, but nonetheless to be considered. Health is a necessity. If a person feels bad or unwell, I doubt if there can be self-improvement, so much energy going into feeling well again, and yet many people manage to rise above their frailties and produce great work. Writers such as Sylvia Plath, Kafka, Keats, Hemingway, RL Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe produced fine works even in the grips of alcoholism, bipolar disorder, depression and tuberculosis. I suspect they used their writing talents to obscure, even overcome their illness.
Refining oneself can also be a bit of a luxury when most people are struggling simply to survive, and even in wealthy New Zealand there will be many more having a tough time of it in these hard times. For sure it’s great that some people in some well-off countries can spend time helping themselves to become more centred, concentrating on courses of self-improvement online, of course.
We all experience loss and the memory of loved ones and past times. We all manage it differently but one thing’s for sure we are all united in feeling it, even if we’ve been practising Zen for decades.
Here’s more of Larkin’s “Reference Back”:
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not used to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.
Reference Back, Philip Larkin