In case your life has been uneventful lately: no matter how anticlimactic or prosaic that might sound, there is great merit in a slow moving, recoverable life. It affords its bearers reflection, merciful cadence, and the odd chance to get things right, to course correct in real time.
Or should it be that the pace has been mad for a while – we might have covered the usual possibilities – then allow me to wonder aloud on your behalf about a little meaning-of-life detail that escapes the usual attention span.
Where, up and down the long list of good intentions, elaborate schemes, core beliefs, statutory fears and all the remainder of the parade of allegations we sweep up behind, is this thing called a self to be found?
Probably like me, you often answer to it, and occasionally you answer for it, and it lays a mighty claim on your fidelity and devotion. But where does it live? Where is it when you’re not thinking about it? Does it, for example, do the thinking for the both of you?
Is this self authorized by friends? Foes? Is it the best of you, that something you try so hard to be true to? Is it, when all is said and done, the rest of you?
Do you have it? Do you learn it? Earn it? Spurn it?
Here’s why I ask: Should an affliction come your way that bothers or bosses you around that is, say, in the entrails, then your entrails suddenly and unsubtly become your self. If the affliction is in your walk, then how you walk is how you are. If your face gets hurt in an enduring way, you surely discover how much your face is your self.
But when your hurt is in your mind, that identity pattern doesn’t seem to hold in the same way. When it’s your brain we’re talking about, we equivocate. When the brain is in question, are you still you? Where should your friends look for you if they mean to find you?
When your mind is ailing, is it fitting that you are still yourself?
What else is there? What are the choices?
Is there some other story to tell? Some other story or self or unself to be?
*
I am just off two months on the road, and have begun today to set my mind in the direction of Trembling, Still, and the meetings at the Orphan Wisdom Hall and in Wales. On my first morning back, I look out the window upon the beginning of the ending of winter. I see that the sap buckets are on the maple trees. I see the second lamb is born this morning. I see the current bearing the breaking ice pack downstream in front of the house.
I see all of this continuity, and I wonder about how much of the self continues, or should, when in the crosshairs of affliction. And I am deeply fortunate that there are those among you keen to wonder upon these things too, and that you are willing to congregate with me to do it, together.
*
Once I’ve finished this note to you, I walk down the road a bit to the guest house, where Gregory is waiting for me to begin recording the audio version of Trembling, Still. And I am bringing all these questions with me. What kind of voice does this story require, or deserve? Who am I now to that old man who wrote those things down? Am I simply an older man, deeper in his affliction? Is having a self still the best move to make, the best faith to keep, the best line to walk?
I am thinking myself into readiness for your visit.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
