Accept the universe that lies in front of you

This was not much of a summer. There were only a few hints of the vaunted Okanagan heat, and never for more than a day or two at a time. We muted the air conditioner for much of the season, and we shut it off altogether in early August. Now, at the equinox, the heat has retreated to the south. The nights are cool, and a light shirt is no longer enough to protect against the early morning chill.

Heavy clouds occasionally obscure the mountaintops around the valley, though only once have they hung around all day. Still, even those brief reminders of the greyness of winter to come make me grateful for every hour of sunshine. The drab winter months will come soon enough.

We came west to dissolve the drabness and sameness of our Ottawa life. Now that we have completed almost one complete seasonal cycle here, we can see hints of some new habits of life that in themselves could become patterns of drabness and sameness.

Changing location does not change personality. You are what you are, and you take yourself wherever you go. The geographical cure does not solve relationship problems, job problems, or inertia problems. This is not unique to us, and it is certainly not a modern phenomenon. Plato wrote that Socrates was once asked why a certain man was still crabby after coming back from a pleasure trip, and he given a simple explanation: the man had had to travel with himself.

It seems all too human to complain. Some people are lucky enough never to wonder “Why me?” and others are wise enough to outgrow the question, realizing that stuff happens to everybody — including things that from their personal perspective appear to be bad and good. Still, it takes an effort to accept every quirk of the universe with equanimity. This acceptance might take the form of religious surrender, or it could be some other form of psychological self-defense. Herman Melville, for example, buried this reflection deep in the pages of Moby-Dick:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints.

That view gives a reason anyway, even if it paints a harsh picture of human life, as full of “hard things visible and invisible.”

There is another familiar fallacy that some people harbor to distance themselves from a reality that might take courage to face. It begins with the words “If only.” Things could be so much better if only they had more money, more friends, a better job, less snow to shovel in the winter. The implication is that life could be perfect if conditions were just a little more favorable.

If you are going to be happy in paradise, it will not be because you are in paradise but because you are you. And if a new place will make you a different person, it will not be because of the place but because you are determined to change. Happiness is a choice, not the result of circumstances.

All things considered, I have been blessed with one of the best lives of all time, and it is not because of where I am or what I own or who I know. It is simply the result of my general attitude. I believe my life and situation would seem like a beautiful dream to most of the people on this planet — in fact, to most of the people who have ever lived.

And why would I ever want to be somebody else? Our image of other lives is never realistic. Many of the pleasant faces we encounter, either in person or in pictures, mask miserable interiors, anxieties, worries, troubles that nobody would choose to own. When I think of the beauty of music and wonder what it might be like for a professional musician to live inside that beauty, I normally consider only the esthetic pleasure of performance, the applause and acclaim of an audience, never the monotonous hours of rehearsal, the days away from home in strange hotels without the leisure to explore new cities.

If you envy somebody’s life, remember that from some limited perspective your own life could seem better than others as well, and that people might easily envy your life if they saw only the surface.

Our circumstances have been very different from what we pictured at the beginning of this summer. The plans Catherine and I brought to Kelowna have had to be shelved for now, and we have seen how quickly life can change, for better or worse. We have not been able to walk together for months. Friends tell us about their camping adventures, their days swimming or hiking, while we have been camping out in hospital waiting rooms.

Ralph Waldo Emerson saw discontent as the want of self-reliance. He called it infirmity of will. To cure it, he recommended focusing on the business of life.

So we deal with the life in front of us, grateful for the friends and the mountains and the skies, even for the clouds, and we recognize that circumstances only represent the hand we have been given. Whatever they are, however harsh they seem to be, we still have to play that hand. How we play it will determine whether life becomes a matter of joy or of regret.

The unanswered question

I've been told that I should have answered the question that ended yesterday's post.

For better or worse, I see it as the question that underlies everything I write. If I answer it, I might have to go on to a tougher question -- Who are you? -- which is your own business.

Life is more than words can express -- but what is that?

It’s almost a century since my Yiddish-speaking mother stepped off the boat at Ellis Island and into English culture. It did not take long for her to become a stickler for proper language usage, and by the time I came along she could serve as my first arbiter of the way things oughta be.

My father may have been the teacher in the family, but she was the one who taught us that there was not a right way and a wrong way to speak, not a right word and a wrong word to use — just a right way and right words, and we had to know them. She loved the way I excelled at spelling, and she did not tolerate grammatical errors. It was a surprise to many that English was not her first language.

Some of my most poignant memories of her late years are of a confused woman groping to express thoughts that did not jump into her consciousness with clarity. She would stop in mid-sentence, click her tongue, and say, “Ah, what’s that word?” And I would wait, sometimes for a thought that eluded her.

The human brain is an amazing instrument, an apparatus, according to the Devil’s Dictionary, with which we think that we think. Robert Frost called it a wonderful organ, which starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office. True, both true, but neither insight is very helpful for a neuroscientist.

What the brain does in Act Five is more unpredictable than earlier in life. Like the rest of the body, it begins to erode at the edges and to act (if I may indulge in a strange analogy) as if it had a mind of its own.

Twice in the past few days I have stopped in a conversation because I needed the concepts of introvert and extrovert, and all I was coming up with were the wrong words: optimist and pessimist. This was not a good sign. It has always been important for me to come up with the right word at the right time.

If I were the worrying type, misplacing a couple of words could have been alarming the first time and an invitation for panic the second time. And many older people, when they forget a word or a name or the location of their car keys, think this may be the beginning of the end. I have thought about these things for years, and I know that the beginning of the end comes early in life.

As it is, I was able to go on with the correct words after an uncomfortable pause, but I began to think it might not be a good idea to live for another twenty years if I lose my vocabulary along the way.

In the allegorical medieval play Everyman, the eponymous central character is abandoned by everything and everybody he thought he could depend on, including possessions, good looks, strength, and relatives. In the end, according to the plot, knowledge is the last friend to leave him, and he can take only his good deeds with him.

This all relates to what a person really is. The modern play (and movie) Whose Life is It Anyway? poses the issue in terms of a sculptor who becomes a paraplegic and who wants to die as a result. As a culture, we are far enough from Everyman to know that we are not our goods, our thoughts, our emotions. Yet, at an advanced age, as our knees give out and our words begin to fail, we each still ask the most fundamental of questions: who am I?

What the seasons have come to mean

As I re-hashed my life when I wrote my memoir, I was struck by how many events resembled incidents and situations that had happened years before. They were never the same, of course. I was older the second (even the third) time, and conditions were different; but in looking back, I could recognize many of the same choices, the same alternatives.

This suggested that the journey through life is as complex as listening to a musical fugue. In the fugue, a melody is repeated again and again but altered each time, with a different key or a new rhythm. The multiple variations at times become so complex that it is difficult to recognize the original theme.

For long periods of my life I would wake up in the morning and greet the dawn by saying “Another day — another chance to get it right.” It was as if each day gives a little more experience, so that the older person can face the same issues with more wisdom, more equanimity. In the Ground Hog Day image, we move toward the Buddhist state of Nirvana, a state of release with no more Karma to pay back.

Getting older, a person recognizes the passage of seasons with more wistfulness. Summer is not just time for another vacation, winter more than a time to dust off the snow shovel.

During the years when I lived in Ottawa, I noticed a marked change in the weather at the beginning of September. There was no mistaking the end of summer and the beginning of a long descent into extreme cold. There was a beauty and a sereniity associated with this change, of course: the pesky summer bugs disappeared, and the leaves on hardwood trees transmuted themselves into brilliant reds and oranges and yellows.

The signals may be different here in Kelowna, but they also show up at the beginning of September, even if only briefly. This past Tuesday, low clouds obscured the tops of the mountains that surround the Okanagan Valley. It was the first time I had seen that meteorological feature since last spring. During the winter it is constant, obscuring the valley with an atmospheric cocoon and insulating it against most of the harshness of winter.

There is a broken cloud deck today, with clumps of cumulus, some small ones, narrow, dense and dark, stretching across the sky, but there are also refreshing patches of blue in every direction. It is not yet time for the clouds to close the valley in. But nobody doubts that the heat of summer is mostly gone, and it is more than the absence of tourists that shows it.

In a way that Ralph Waldo Emerson was never able to do, Catherine has taught me to see natural facts as symbols of spiritual facts. If much of nature is cyclical, if the seasons come and go, if events in our lives repeat themselves, then any positives or negatives we perceive can also be shown to be mistaken in time.

The only things you can be sure of, I have heard, are death and taxes. In the many years when I paid no income taxes I managed to sidestep one side of that truism, but I have no illusions about the other side. I do not believe (as William Saroyan did) that an exception would be made in my case, and I am certainly not enough of a solipsist to believe that the world began when I was born and that it will end when I go. Rather, it becomes easier for me to see my own existence as part of an endless cavalcade of life. And I appreciate Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 more strongly than ever.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Missed opportunities

Yesterday we stopped at a farm stand along the highway up in the mountains. Function Junction was run by a loquacious woman as unexpected as the name of her farm. I asked about everything sold at that remote location, including the blueberries that had just disappeared from the shelves, the cherries that were gone for the year, and the raspberries that were just starting to come in.

I would rather buy produce from growers than at a store, especially when they meet my questions about pesticides with such scorn and distaste that I know the fruits are reasonably poison-free. I bought a bag of what the woman called banana potatoes, much smaller than chicken eggs, and some peaches that were as hard as any I could have found at the supermarket.

She said the peaches would last for a few weeks in the refrigerator, and that I could just take them out a couple of days before I wanted to eat them. Which struck me as strange because I have a memory — which doesn’t seem too distant — of eating fresh fruit without having to prepare for the experience two days in advance.

But there you go. If I think I will want to eat fruit in two days, I can get ready today by taking a peach out of the refrigerator. Stretch the snack out over a couple of days.

The BC fruit outlet not far from where we live is a clearinghouse for all fresh produce that comes into Kelowna, with prices often better than in any store and additional discounts for bulk sales. Even there, except for apples and pears, I expect the fruit to be a few days away from ripe when I buy it.

It is always risky to buy fruit in Canada. In Ottawa, I usually avoided buying fruit for much of the year because the kiwis and plums we got in our winter could easily have been shipped from Chile or New Zealand in another geologic epoch. Sometimes I would buy a mango in August hoping it would be ripe before the first snow.

But that was better than in Thunder Bay, where we used to plant tomatoes and bring the plants into the house before they ripened. We would hang them in the basement and pick them as they looked ready, usually the following January. I never saw a ripe tomato outside there.

There are some items that are not part of the fruity cornucopia of the Okanagan — those that come from the tropics mainly, or from year-round warm climates, such as bananas, mangoes, and oranges. When I was young, it was rare to see these out of season because the shipping took too long or was too expensive. We now expect to get them at any time of year, and not having them is a temporary inconvenience. But nobody is surprised that getting fresh fruit from halfway around the world is more of a gamble than getting it locally.

This is poles away from what I was had in mind when I sat down to write a couple of hours ago. I was actually thinking about what happened to me in the Superstore yesterday when I was returning a bag of oranges that had turned out to be all pulp and no juice. In fact, I wrote the headline for this article before I began. Most unusual.

Here’s where the headline begins to make sense.

The counter at Customer Service was full of cell phones, and the person waiting on me asked if I wanted to buy one cheap. It sounded like something you could expect to hear from a shady character who had just opened the back doors of his truck. But it turned out that the store had received a large shipment of 2015 phones that it could not sell or advertise because the models already on display were more up to date.

“We were told to discount them and get rid of them,” the rep explained “They’re all twenty-five dollars now, and we’re going to put up a sign inviting people to get them here. Nothing wrong with them except that they don’t have the same features as the new ones.”

How often does an opportunity like that fall into your lap? There were several models, including the type I got a year ago for $300. Now I could pick up one — or several — for a fraction of that.

My regular readers will not be surprised that I said no. Technology does not fascinate me enough for an offer like that to be attractive. But back in the car Catherine asked me why I hadn’t just taken one or two. I could give them away. Lots of other people would be happy to get a 2015 cell phone.

Well, that was yesterday and this is today. A gift horse stared me in the face — I get a chance to use the word “literally” her — and I didn’t think outside my usual box. I sped by it on the road (not literally), and that kind of opportunity may never come up again.

Life is full of missed opportunities, but they are rarely so obvious.