Tuesday, February 27, 2001

 

10:15 a.m. Last night I was listening to a meditation tape on the radio that was recorded a long while ago, a long long time ago, sometime in the '60s, by Alan Watts. His name might be familiar to older readers. He was a scholar and a teacher who brought the concepts of Zen Buddhism to people in the West.

He had a British accent. Has. It's quite distinctive.

Last night, I was listening while doing other things, and for the first time, ever, I think one of the key concepts finally sunk in. Maybe I can explain it here and maybe it will help another traveler cross that shaky balsa bridge strung across the black chasm that we call time.

You see, he was talking about the concept of the universal present and the myth of tomorrow and the lies of yesterday. (I'm paraphrasing. I'm a writer. That's my job.)

10:32 p.m. Now, twelve hours have passed in this particular past. But it's lies, all lies. I happen to be telling the truth, but since all telling is subjective, all truth is relative. This is getting incredibly tangled and there are no drugs involved.

11:57 p.m. Almost the next day already. For an essay about the non-reality of time, an awful lot of time is passing. I have little buttons at the bottom of every page that say "yesterday" and "tomorrow" and that's yet another irony.

If time doesn't really exist, we sure do spend a lot of it marking it.

12:25 a.m. And it marks me, as well. I wish I could have found (the time) this morning to have finished my initial thoughts, but too many other things intervened and before I knew it, the day was over and I've been finding it harder and harder to get a grip on that bright illusive fish swimming so fetchingly in my stream of consciousness lo! these several hours ago.

So now, I'll just try to speak simply. I've always had the idea in my mind that one of these days I'd be better than today. The general thoughts go something like this: Next season I'll be thinner than right now, for sure. Or: In a few months, we'll be out of the woods, financially, and things will be back to normal.

Or: Soon, I'm going to start exercising. Really! I can see it happening. Or: As soon as I can get come clear space, I'm going to sit down and write the next book and it's going to be a good one. A really good one. People will buy it and I will be inspired and then I'll write the next one, and the next.

These are my future myths. They are my sustaining future myths. They've always been there, just ahead like a wavy mirage and they've never, ever come true. They can't, of course. It's obvious, even to me, that this is so.

But what to do?

Picture, if you will, an arm throwing a baseball. The arm is the present and the baseball's trajectory is the future. To make this analogy work even better, you'll have to picture yourself standing at the edge of a cliff, pitching the baseballs out into the void, never to be retrieved.

Now, let's say that you'd like to improve your pitching and maybe even get a ball to the other side of the ravine. Lordy, but this is getting complicated. I had it so clearly in mind this morning; it's all muddled now. But just remember that your arm is the present and your pitch is the future.

My point is/was: all you have, really, is the arm. You only have the ability to strengthen your arm -- to work each day to make it stronger and thus pitch better. Worrying about where you'd like the ball to go or dreaming about how far you'd like to pitch will not help you to do the actual work, which is to make your arm stronger and stronger.

Yeah -- it made better sense this morning. The practical outcome is to do an appropriate action in the eternal present rather than sit and plan or dream or worry. Thus, I started the entry, rather than put it off for later. Better to be writing than to be thinking about writing was the brilliant thought of that moment.

You need a lot of baseballs for this concept to work.