American writer Thomas Wolfe nursed a stout belief that, “you can’t go home again.” It became a theme of his first and most famous novel, ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ as well as the title of his final work. Of course, his line is highly ironic; one certainly can go home again. But when you do, good luck recognizing the place!
And actually, that’s what I think the Southern scribbler was saying. The Suffering of Change—as the Buddhists term it—can be one of the ways we drive ourselves nuts. Apparently, clinging to shapes of the shifting sands of material existence isn’t one of the seven habits of highly enlightened sages.
Today, we enjoy a broad number of maps for the passage of time. The classic linear arrangement—past, present, future—describes the way we arrange most human events. Like heading off to work. It also helps explain geology, archeology, and evolution, as well a steady advance of certain human manifestations such as gray hair, crow’s feet, and old-timer’s disease.
However, modern quantum physics has somersaulted us high up and far over that ancient concept. It stimulates our imaginations with visions of parallel universes, and so prompts fresh and exotic titles, like, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Under this model, reality seems much more plastic, squishy, and it swarms with abundant possibility.
My primary map of time looks like a spiral. And in using this model, I stand in good company. I acquired the notion from Irish poet William Butler Yeats. But my concept is nowhere near as complex as his. His mystic spirals are modeled as two intersecting cones (which he dubbed “gyres”), and they symbolize one civilization spreading out and dissipating while another takes shape within its predecessor.
I prefer a less grand, more elementary spiral. All it signifies is that I can revisit coordinates of my experience, yet at ever higher or lower levels of perception. Depends on my mood, as well as many other circumstances. Basically, Yeats’ idea is needlessly ornate. In fact, the very first line of the first poem I ever sold to a lit journal teased that ol’ Mick versifier. (“A snail knows what a spiral is. // Will B. Yeats. // He inhabits one more manifestly than you or I.”)
And if this sumptuously twisty theme summons to mind a song from the film, “The Thomas Crown Affair”—especially the splendid version sung by Dusty Springfield—that shall prove useful later on.
A TRIAL ON THE TRAIL
How about a more practical, concrete (or dirt) example? More than two decades ago, I trained for my first marathon on a series of trails that twist for about 10 miles up to Skyline Boulevard and Kings Mountain, with an elevation gain of about 2,000 feet.
Last week, I began to trot those trails again. It was amazing how many memories began to bubble up in my brain, while I laid down a fresh line of running shoe prints on some of the same terrain from which rain and wind had erased all marks of my prior visits, ages ago.
Yet here were familiar curves and straights of those paths I’d taken, the sinister roots that had tripped me up several times, footbridges above gullies that appeared only a bit more battered, all the upslopes that had challenged me as well as corresponding descents offering some welcome respite. This was the exterior view.
My interior view seemed rather familiar, too. Here came memorable gripes from my muscle groups (“You want us to do what again, you nut?!”). Many of the same mental strategies I’d concocted and deployed to keep myself moving during my first forays cropped up as well.
A handful of these tactics were standard jogger’s tips like: maintain steady deep breathing; use shortened stride and slower rotation on the steeps; switch to soft footfalls on downslopes to protect foot and leg joints; schedule hydration and snack breaks at certain points as rewards for bits of fresh progress in either distance or speed, and so forth.
A most effective policy to promote my forward progress was a keen focus on the habits of self-talk, modulating that stream as needed. This time, since I pounded the same pathways at a more advanced age, self-talk played a more important role. Due to my heightened physical vulnerability, coupled with a longer healing time, I had to encourage myself to both dare to push the pace yet be more careful, at the same time.
Seeking to both mix and quaff this motivational cocktail while I was also trying to jog uphill made for its own strange kind of fun.
FOSTERING A FEEDBACK LOOP
You may propose that the fundament of our external, physical world is built on those four elements of Dark Age alchemy, or ancient Greek monads, atoms, quarks, or vibrating strings of sheer energy… And no such proposition will ignite any sort of argument from me. I stipulate my ignorance; I’ll embrace a notion that all physical matter is made out of Whatever.
I’m far more certain about the way our interior, psychological realm gets formed: it’s spun out of the recurring themes of our self-talk. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—that’s how we structure our personal reality. Of course, it means we should be quite careful about how we devise and maintain our inner monologues. Regrettably, many people don’t seem to take full advantage of this opportunity.
When we fail to do so, we tend to cycle heedlessly and needlessly around and around the same list of hurts and worries and grievances. It’s commonly known as being stuck in a rut. An alternative is using each second of willed or discovered elevation to view those events from a higher perspective. You might not be able to change what happened, but you can certainly change how you regard what happened. Reframe it. Take lessons from it. Vow you’ll handle things differently in the future, and focus on keeping that promise.
Of course, that’s not the only direction things can go. By reinforcing your pain through repetition, and by near-sighted focus on hurt, by refusing help from others or a dose of self-help, or canceling out any inspiration spontaneously beamed at you from any source, you can sink lower and lower into the suffering, and thus erode your rut far down into a chasm—a void deeper and more difficult to escape. And yet, even so, a person might learn a valuable lesson from doing precisely that.
And this lesson would be: mind is potent. While it can bolster despair to unbearable levels, by the same token, using the same power, it can also create a seed of hope out of next-to-nothing, then water and nourish it with assiduous care till it grows into something mighty, sustaining, and irresistible.
In both examples, one channels the passage of time into a spiral shape, a trajectory that circles over the same rough coordinates, but at varying perceptual elevations. Naturally, the results you get shall depend on which directions you choose.
PERFECTION IS NOT A THING
The subhead right above this sentence is actually a quote. It’s one of the aphorisms I picked up from a Zen Buddhist nun in San Francisco. And she came by her percept in a forthright and tangible manner. She’d spent all her spare time one summer working to restore a BMW 2002 sedan. First, she improved its mechanics, then reupholstered the interior, and finally sanded and repainted the body. When all was done, she parked it under a grove of precisely the wrong set of weeping trees. In one night, the sadistic foliage devastated her paintjob with a deluge of acidic sap.
“I felt way-y depressed for about a week,” she told me. “But then I realized, perfection is not a thing.”
Right. She’d done her level best, next those trees had done their absolute worst, and the result was simply the result. No matter how “perfect” she’d try to make her automobile be, it could never attain perfection in and of itself, since perfection is not an item.
It’s always and only a judgement. Her car still ran and handled great, so she determined that calling this situation okay would free her from the suffering of change.
This anecdote illustrates a concept that I think applies quite well to the writing process.
EACH PIECE OF WRITING CAN BE IMPROVED
It used to be that I hated revising manuscripts. Some of this was due to the actual labor involved. I hale from a way-distant era in which our first drafts were initially scrawled on pads of paper with ink or pencil, edited by the same method, then finally typed out—with considerable angst involved if an error was made and you were forced to retype that page.
But some of my reluctance also came from a finding that irritated: despite all the mental sweat that went into dreaming up and crafting my piece in the first place, I’d find it still hadn’t hit the mark. A particular metaphor seemed clumsy, the rhythm was off, the logic proved suspect, etc. In short, the project hadn’t become “perfect.” Welp, try, try again.
The advent of computers and word programs has certainly troweled this process much smoother. (Don’t even talk to me about AI, ain’t goin’ there, girlfriend! That kind of crutch will cripple your legs, I’m sure of it.) But with computers massively reducing the labor of rewrite, basic textual revision turns relatively frictionless. And I now take considerable delight in coaxing prose into more efficient and seductive terms of enchantment.
In other words, as I write, I spiral over the same coordinates, seeking to improve a reader’s experience each time. And in still more words, I’ve come to enjoy the fine sanding that encourages an angel to emerge a tad further from that formerly blank block of marble—or virgin page.
WHERE WRITING AND RUNNING CROSS PATHS
Both running and writing are endurance sports, no question about it. And my way to overcome laziness or doubt or resistance in each pursuit does feel quite similar, too. What’s particularly amusing is that my current return to running is designed to assist a writing project. Literally, and literarily.
One of my touchstones in conducting research for a story is an urge to visit the actual landscapes were big events occurred. I suppose, in my mind, it’s like prepping a set in a theater. After I take in the lay of the land, I find I’m much more able to block the movements of my characters, and visualize their actions. That means I can more accurately sketch out a given scene for my readers, so they can more easily project the “movie” of events that happen inside their own skulls whilst they are transforming my words into imagery.
In a few months, I’ll gain a chance to make a pilgrimage to an important battlefield in mountainous terrain. I shall tour that landscape with historians, and also with active-duty soldiers who seek to draw both tactical information and strategic inspiration from this trek to a historic site.
Have you ever tried to keep up with highly trained, active-duty soldiers? Can any codger ever imitate the pace of fit, young men? Or can he, at least, not fail too badly at doing so?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. But I do know two things: I want to hoover up all possible knowledge from this tour; and I truly would like to avoid embarrassing myself. I never expect to be perfect; but I do intend to demonstrate a best effort. So, I’ve begun to physically train—well in advance of need.
Oh, I also know a third thing. As part of this group, I will be one more entity spiraling with others above a set of space-time coordinates. As a brutal war was ending, an outfit of Resistance fighters occupied some high ground and were surrounded by an overwhelming enemy force. [WL-81-R goes here]
Due to many impressive exertions plus individual heroics, they were able to hold that superior antagonist at bay until peace finally arrived.
Afterwards, historians crafted their accounts, participants wrote their memoirs, a museum was built below the site, and annual tours were created to keep an understanding fresh about what had happened here. All such efforts were, “like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel” (op. cit. “Windmills of Your Mind”).
Soon, it will be my turn to take a spin above those exact same coordinates. And after I write this experience up, it can also be yours.
REINFORCING A HOLOGRAM OF LIFE
Let’s address the notion of the make-up of our reality once more. If the most basic substrate of existence is physical matter, our minds are mere oddities that perch upon it, like a fly on the rim of a saucer of soup. In a materialistic scheme of things, then, the birth of the human mind is accidental, a neurological overreach that occurred amid our evolution—the sort of thing philosophers dub an “epiphenomenon.” It’s a biological blind alley, a bizarre sideshow, a mere genetic sport. A quirk to puzzle over, perhaps marvel at, yet then dismiss as marginally relevant. If even that.
But! If the essence of our universe IS mind, then reality’s dominant theme has to be consciousness. And all of physical matter stands revealed as only the boards beneath our feet in the vast stage of our cosmic theater. With that scenario, the content of our contemplations becomes more real than a mountain range can ever be.
And if that’s so—returning our attention to the topic of time—the past vividly recalled remains present due to its sheer presence in our minds, and the future, imagined, gets to be present there as well. Less tangible, perhaps, but no less real. And that age-old linear model coils back upon itself to display a quite entertaining flexibility. Truly, a yoga pose for the ages.
So, the values and the virtues of the stories we strive to maintain, well, they get to hover in mind like a hologram. All that’s required to hold them in existence is the very same thing that keeps the diminishments of entropy at bay in any situation: offering an infusion of fresh energy. It’s like the charge that can be stored in an electrical coil—which is a literal spiral of conductivity, if you will.
And so, in my life now, I get to revisit running. And in my writing, currently, I get to revisit all the heroics of popular resistance to fascism. And in my consciousness, I get to uphold these things and many more besides, viewing them from as many different angles as I’m able to imagine. It’s not the same as grasping after material goods or situations, it’s a far slinkier dynamic. Because possession isn’t the goal; comprehension is. And that comprehension may channel through you, but it’s not yours; it belongs to the Cosmos.
By way of a footnote, I’ll cite one story that we’ve seen before, and seem to adore enough to try to envision it over and over again. The first “Thomas Crown Affair” film came out in 1968. The remake appeared in 1999. And now it looks like we’ll get a third iteration about year 2027. Maybe we can’t make a story perfect, but hey, we can certainly make it anew. So now, right there, you’ve got a hologram with legs.