Southside Café, Old Sonoma Road, Napa, California, USA
March 5, 2018
It
happened
gradually - and as if all by itself (I don't recall making a conscious
decision to do it). Yet
now
when I
look
at it, I
see
it's firmly in place:
hiking
is included in my weekly fitness regimen, along with running,
swimming,
and weight training. I target
hiking
every day at sunrise for about an hour, having moved my other three
gymnasium-specific activities to later in my daily schedule. Mostly I
like to
hike
by ... my ...
Self.
And some
times
I'll
invite
a
friend(s)
to
hike
with me. One of the great things about
hiking
with a
friend,
is we're likely to
open
up and
speakfreely
in these
pristine,
natural,
bucolic, unthreatening
environments.
But that's not
why
I
invitefriends,
mind
you. Yet it is
what happens.
It's a fringe benefit. An additional perk. A
privilege,
actually. No, I
invitefriends
to
hikeso we can
hike
(hiking
is very
Zen).
"The world
is just so
messed up
right
now"
she
said,
looking
down following my caution to avoid a
slippery
clump of muddy leaves. "Oh? So
how
do you
know
that?" I
asked
her. "I read newspapers" she
said,
looking
up again. "Wouldn't you like a second
opinion?"
I
asked.
"No, I don't need one: I've already
got
a second
opinion"
she
said.
"How
so?" I asked. "Well" she replied, "I
watch
TV too.". "That's not what I
meant,
smarty pants" I
saidsmiling
(one smart aleck
easily
recognizes another).
How ever
conversations
such as this one go (and you've probably been in one or three like it
yourself), there are a few predictable pitfalls along
the way,
the most
commonly
noteworthy of which is that as soon as you offer
"it's OK the way it is
(and
the way
it isn't)" ie as soon as you ante up your stake in the
conversation
with it, you're most likely going to be
interpreted
as either
being
apathetic to
the world
situation, or totally ignorant of it, or callously indifferent to it,
or something else even more sinister, or all of the above. And the
trouble
is that without the
possibility
of
transformedlistening,
and certainly without the
possibility
of a
transformedworldview, those may indeed be the only logical,
rational conclusions to
come up
with, even among good and decent people.
I proposed this to her: if you can't
getit's OK the way it is
(and
the way
it isn't), then you can't
transform
your life. I don't
knowwhytransformation
comes with this unwavering, no-exceptions pre-condition.
But it does. And if you don't
getit's OK the way it is
(and
the way
it isn't), then I can't explain it to you, and neither can I convince
you of it, and I certainly don't have a better set of
debating
points
about it than you. However, none of that is required: the fact is
you can't
get it
that
way
anyway. No kidding!
I'm sorry,
but you can't. Rather,
the way
you
get it
is ontologically. You
get itexperientially.
You
look
... and you
see
things are
the way
they are (and
the way
they aren't).
Getting it,
you have to bracket your
personal
judgements and all your preferences and all your intellectual
mischief-making, and just
look.