Thoughts on Being Asked for Birthday Wisdom

I have a friend who always asks people for new found wisdom every birthday. I jotted this down when I turned thirty.

I recall my early childhood often. The slant of light through a half-open curtain; the soft low of a cow heard while driving by a pasture; a description of country roads in a Chekhov story will each carry my mind to those sultry summer evenings spent waiting at the window of my grandparents' country home for the sun to fall and the cows to return from grazing. Memory follows memory and I begin to yearn for the taste of fresh hot milk and remember how much deeper I slept in that rickety old bed, lulled to sleep by cricket song at dusk. I have read advice that one should always, when traveling someplace new, bring with them a few pieces of unheard music that will serve as powerful reminders of how it felt to be somewhere. Charles Mingus' “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” with its haunting blues and feverish rhythms is tied to hours spent waiting in the cool morning breeze for sunrise over the bay in Singapore. But such recollections of adulthood are rarer and weaker than the many memories I have kept of my childhood. I have often wondered if my slow emotional necrosis is an inescapable effect of growing up and giving up that state of innocence Blake talks of in which we can see the world in a grain of sand and can hold eternity in an hour. I have lost the ability to profoundly experience life, and yet have retained the knowledge that the experience is incomplete. For the Hopi tribe of Arizona, the Grand Canyon was a place of pilgrimage, the navel of the world and the birthplace of humanity. One can imagine, perhaps by reference to the ecstasies set down on paper by medieval pilgrims to Jerusalem or Mecca, how it must have felt to a Hopi youth to bathe in the waters of the Colorado at the end of a long journey. I doubt such depth of feeling is any longer possible. I am not capable of it. I enjoy nature, as any youthful middle class suburbanite does, but I cannot remember the last time I looked upon it, on any of it, from the first bloom of poppies in spring, to sunrise viewed from atop a solitary snowy peak, with anything but a mild pleasure that bordered on indifference. I sometimes wish I could capture that state of enlightened compassion one sees upon the face of Botticelli’s Venus and Primavera. Yet, looking longer at those paintings, I come to understand that such equanimity towards the world can only be had by giving up the disgust I bear it and which sustains the hobbies where I most often find the touch of beauty I look for. Our lives become memorable when they show us the world stripped of the unconscious automation of habit. Perhaps the longer we live, the more, that is, that we accrue life and strip it of its novelty, the easier it becomes to allow ourselves to be borne upon the tranquil sea of habit, and it takes an ever more unlikely miracle of serendipity to bring us face to face with true beauty.

I do not know if I have true wisdom to offer. Wisdom is the purview of people more self assured than I am. I will plant a fig tree in my backyard in the hopes that, years from now, I shall sit in its shade and find, like the Buddha resting under the bodhi tree, some wisdom, or, if that is too much to ask, a bit more peace at least.