The Year to Come

We anticipate a year of writing, though 2015 requires of us only weekly Tribune articles by the end of January before we call it quits. A decade of “opinionating” at ST with a brief stint on the pages of Marianas Variety next-door (before my attention was called to the serious awkwardness of writing in two competing dailies) was long enough to have stepped on everyone’s toes!

Don›t matter now. To speculate on what might have transpired if I stood my ground on writing in two papers is fruitless, if even possible. In the stoic stance appropriate for the age, I follow the insight of Andrew Bernstein›s phrasing in his book, The End of Stress: “We are tiny specks of presumption suspended in a vast universe of uncertainty.” Or to the Buddhists’ wisdom that enlightenment happens as an accident; meditation does not make enlightenment happen but makes the postulant prone to the accident. I tend to be accident-prone!

It is the Year-to-Come that is on our plate at the moment and though prognosticating had not been one of my strong suits, I can at least declare what I intend to do. I take the great celebration of the incredible wellness of being to heart, forsaking Kierkegaard’s image of Sickness Unto Death that thrives on the losing story that “the world sucks.” The enabling choice is the awesomeness of life as is.

Joyce Marshall of the Realistic Living Institute pulled out a set of vows from a Buddhist ritual that she made into her own interreligious spin as Relating to the Mystery of Life. With a tweak of terms, I made it my own as well, my Vows to the Wellness Unto Life.

The past is done. I vow to let it go.
The future is coming. I vow to open it.
The present is a gift. I vow to receive it.
My life is given. I vow to embrace it.
 
Illusions are inexhaustible. I vow to forsake them.
The deluded are numberless. I vow to liberate them.
Injustices are rampant. I vow to rectify them.
Earth restoration is critical. I vow to enrich it.
 
Spirit practices are plenty. I vow to know them.
The sound of silence is deafening. I vow to trust it.
Awesome fullness is overwhelming. I vow to love it.
Realistic living is miraculous. I vow to choose it.
 
2015 marks another turn in my journey. January is more than the end of this column. It is a serious choice to go fulltime on my seven-year itch of writing an 86-year journey experience before I go quietly into the night. “On what?” a friend asked. “On a single, solitary selfie trek into wellness unto life, silly.”

The response is not just being cute. It is an affirmation of the cruciality of consciousness of self as the beginning point of wisdom. Deep is the insight of the despair Kierkegaard wrote about in Sickness Unto Death, but that was against a bias of fear on the infinite, the mysterious, and the real, all writ in capital letters, experienced in dread and fascination, an internal state of being. “The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” the psalmist of old chanted. Foisting “Fear Not” is Bishop Spong’s message this season.

The self of our beginnings is located in space, bookended in time, measured at 86 turns of the planet around the sun on mine. At the center of it is the aware self who deigns to choose the fullness of its finite awareness; temporal but known, and tangibly real in its concrete relations with other bodily incarnate beings.

The self is that creature experienced by a body’s “five senses,” with a reflexive capacity to emote in the poetry and poesy of the feelings they entail, then discourses in words and numbers from a mind that communicates to others as well as relate to its own integrated system of cognition, and then intentionally develop patterns and processes of behavior that encourage the reflex to be protective of survival, and the consciousness of relations to others. I am talking about many layers of consciousness that makes a self conscious of itself and conscious of the process of being conscious of itself.

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self,” wrote the Dane.

Not clear yet? Well, me knowing me is an occasion of awe (the network of nerves alone beats anything AT&T can put together) on the awesome (86 years of history, mystery, and the sheer gift that I am) that may gather a group of awed ones (folks who also know themselves to be “one, unique, unrepeatable gifts of life in history, of which there has never been one like each before, and never be another one again”) to ritualize that sense of awe-full-ness. We can do this sans extrapolating an external reality with capital letters deus ex machina, requiring a redeemer to save us from the debilitating case of being at a disadvantage (dejado) at the gate of beginnings!
Life and the world do not suck; but relating to it is awesome, llamado en la puerta! That’s realistic living in the Year to Come.