Immediate Life

Immediate Life

After examining the thoughts in movement in my head, I'm just sitting here allowing sensation to be active in its own way. Breathing in and out.

It's raining outside and there are birds calling. The presence of birds in the maple tree outside my office window is a continuously comforting one. They often alight directly outside my window; it's blooming, so there are red adornments on its branches celebrating the spring, which create different effects against a cloudy sky or a blue one. This feeds me with quite lovely impressions all day long.

This morning a nor'easter is blowing through. One might think the wind would create agitation, but it's actually rather calm right now, and the rain is another source of comfort.

Does one have any right to feel comforted in the midst of this crisis?

The word immediate means, in its essence, unmediated. Without a mediator. That is, it’s what is experienced directly and without a middleman. To put it in another perhaps arch but entirely appropriate way, it can also mean, without any media.

One can only measure crisis from the immediacy of one's own life. The impressions of life are one way if I sit here looking out over a rainy landscape with trees and birds in front of me. They’re different if I open up my iPad and read all the dire news from around the world. That news and that experience is as divorced from my immediate truths as the news of the tsunami in 2004 was. It killed well over 200,000 people; yet in the ice-cold and terrifyingly accurate observation Stalin once made, to most of us it was just a statistic.

No matter what I read, I don't ever actually live in the world of the statistics.

I live where I am now.

I don't read the news during most of the day—not in any great quantity. I inform myself a few times a day on the broad strokes of what is going on in the epidemic; but I can't live on a steady diet of this material. It's somewhat applicable to my immediate life—peripherally, not as its center of gravity. It's like watching the nor'easter, which is outside right now, on the radar: it's a tremendous storm, but locally, very little is happening right now.

This is the only yardstick we ever really have – our immediate experience. That fact explains why so many people, from individuals to government officials, do so many irrational, clearly wrong things in the midst of a crisis like this. Obvious things which common sense makes clear – wearing masks, for example, or the fact that the amount of virus one is exposed to has everything to do with how sick you actually get—are overlooked because people's immediate experience of their life isn't taken in well with their Being. Mistakes result. If one does not take immediate life into one’s Being in a solid, balanced, and well considered center of gravity, everything that responds to it is equally out of balance and inconsiderate. This train wreck in motion is all too visible in the news… in the personalities... and in the statistics.

Common sense, means, among other things, an ability to take in things with all of one’s senses at the same time — through a commonality of Being. This creates a balance that allows us to sense the reality of our immediate lives and our immediate relationships, think about them rationally, and feel our way through them empathically. To the extent we fail to do this, we make bad decisions that we think look good. A lot of folks are doing that right now.

To me, this means that I have to attend to the yardstick of my experience and make sure it is used with all of my capacities. I'm convinced more than ever that the quality of our responses depends almost entirely on the quality of our Being. The quality of our responses is perhaps the most important action we can bring to this crisis as it unfolds around us. The disaster, as it impacts itself into our society and our culture, is all too revealing when it comes to character, to Being. The results will be written in individual histories as well the greater histories of our age and our culture at large. The best history sees Being more clearly; it is one of the few but most important benefits time confers upon our vision as we age.

Most of us don't live on the scale where our individual qualities of Being will be written into the history books; but we're still deeply responsible for our quality of Being, which determines our quality of action—no matter what.

As Victor Frankl observed in his classic ”Man's Search for Meaning,” at Auschwitz, they were prisoners who were indecent men, and guards who were decent ones.

We make our choices in these matters through the quality of our Being. And this is why our quality of Being deserves our attention first, before all other things.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.