I’ve been in Granada, Spain for a little over a week. The idea of this city has been a conspicuous presence in my imagination for quite a while. The last stronghold of the Mores, the home of Sufi poets and Islamic philosophers of the middle ages, the starting point for Leo Africanus’ colorful adventures, etc…
I guess the reality is both similar and different to what I imagined. Weather-wise, I always imagined it to be warm and dry here. But it’s been quite the contrary – cold and wet, overcast and drizzling almost every day. I might as well be in Vancouver. Go figure. It was rainy in Mérida, rainy in Bacalar, rainy in Madrid, and now rainy in Granada. I’m reminded of that minor character in that Douglas Adams novel – I think it was in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, or maybe the second book in that Dirk Gently series. The character was some type of reluctant, impotent rain god – basically just an unlucky fellow who conjures rain without wanting to, and who has subsequently had to spent his entire life in rain. A comically grumpy character – but who wouldn’t be, under those circumstances? What with all these drizzly rain clouds that have been stalking me across continents, I can’t help but to feel a bit like that character right now.
Coming back to my expectations of Granada, I consider that maybe no place on Earth is ever going to be “as advertised” weather-wise, ever again. Mother nature’s unpredictability, already fraught from the get-go, is getting more and more volatile due to the accelerating rate of climate change. It’s all a hot (and cold) mess. The time for going to a certain vacation destination and expecting a certain type of weather is over. That was for 2 or 5 or 10 years ago. These days, you go to a place and hope for the best. You hope to get lucky. But don’t hold your breath. The chances of experiencing the “typical” weather of that place is lower all the time. But that being said, who knows, maybe it’s also my expectations of Granada that are skewed. Maybe it’s always drizzly and overcast here this time of year. In any case, this is all neither here nor there. I didn’t come to talk about weather or about Granada. I wanted to talk about nostalgia.
So it’s raining and I’m in a laundromat. I’m alone and I brought my notebook and a novel to pass the time. I picked up the novel in a local bookstore the other day. It’s a very short 105-page novel (or would it be considered a novella?) by Hermann Hesse – El Ultimo Verano De Klingsor (Klingsor’s Last Summer). I’ve been sitting here reading this book and I’m enjoying it. I’m savoring the emotional experience it’s giving me. The book is about the last summer of an impressionist painter. He’s in his early 40’s and doesn’t know that it’s his last summer. He’s living and painting in a rural village in Switzerland. The book is dripping with poignance and nostalgia, all seen through Klingsor’s subjective, painterly eye. For example, we witness a magic day that Klingsor shares hiking and adventuring with his artist friends. The expression on the face of a beautiful woman looking out her window who Klingsor momentarily locks eyes with, as he and his friends pass by. “For a long breath they looked seriously at each other, then both smiled briefly and intimately, and parted gazes – the eternal greeting between the sexes, the old friendship, avid and sweet.” (my rough, paraphrased translation). Another scene, a sunset in Switzerland’s mountainous countryside. Klingsor laying in the grass, tired after a long day of painting, watching as the colors change and the golden light gradually bleeds out into darker hues of blue and green. Klingsor is tortuously aware of the beauty of it all, and he tries to drink in these moments, capture these scenes. He tries to immortalize them on canvas. It almost works, but it’s not the same. The moments will never come back, no matter how hard he tries. He is also a drinker and a womanizer. He is torn between his libertine nature and a more spiritual way of existence. Life is short. Why not eat, drink and be merry? But at the same time, life is short. Don’t waste it. Use it to develop your highest spiritual faculties. That timeless inner struggle. In short, I find Klingsor very relatable (except the drinker and womanizer part – I mean definitely in the spirit of having those impulses and temptations, but not quite as much expressed in action). In terms of the contrasting forces and inner struggle Klingsor embodies, I think he is like many of us, men and women included.
The book’s tone, as I’ve mentioned, is quite nostalgic. For me at least. Not in the sense that Klingsor’s character is so much obsessed with some wistful past, but more so in the sense that I, as the reader, am made to feel the poignancy and fleetingness of the scenes, and I don’t really want the book to end – just like I don’t want my life to end. I am half-dreading Klingsor’s inexorable death. A part of me wants to go back to the day Klingsor spent with his friends and stay there. The emotional effect the book is having on me has led me to put the book down, and it’s gotten me reflecting on my relationship with nostalgia outside of literature…ready for my reflections? Ahem. *clears throat. Straightens imaginary tie.* Nostalgia, I think, is to feel pain and loss for something that’s gone and won’t ever return. But it’s also an indulgence of that pain, a holding on, a comfort blanket of yearning that we use to keep our memories warm – a yearning to recover that unrecoverable past. This holding-on quality of nostalgia can be dangerous. It’s nice to warm ourselves with the comfort blanket, but we can’t stay under it all day. We have to get out of bed and face the day. This is where meditation and mindfulness practice can be quite useful. Meditation, put one way, is exercising our letting go muscle. Letting go, over and over. It is therefore a perfect antidote to the holding-on quality implicit in nostalgia. Meditation helps us loosen our attachment to the past and to live more fully in the present. It is up to each of us how we decide to balance these elements in our lives.
The first strong experience of nostalgia that I can remember having was when I was 7 years old. One day, during a quiet afternoon, I went rummaging in an old dresser. In one of the drawers I came across a framed picture of my younger brother (the middle brother of the three of us). My brother would have been 5 at the time this occurred, but the smiling portrait I discovered had captured him around the age of 3. Suddenly, I was struck by the differences between my current, five-year-old brother, and what he had been like at the age of 3, two years prior. His locks, having since turned dirty blond or light brown, had been more golden. His face had been more babyish and cherubic. I realized at that moment that never in my life would I ever be able to witness and play with the 3-year-old version of my brother ever again. I felt a sudden, immense longing to go back and be with that 3-year-old version of him. I was completely overwhelmed and began to cry. I wept for the 3-year-old version of my brother that I would never again be with. I wept bitter tears against time. And yet, I distinctly remember there being a thread of delicious pleasure in those tears, some type of subtle satisfaction. I cried for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, or perhaps it was only a minute, or less, and the time has since dilated in my subsequent remembering of the event. After crying, I carefully returned the picture to where I had found it and left the room. I didn’t tell anybody what had happened. In the weeks that followed I returned to that drawer multiple times. There had been something thrilling, almost addictive, in that initial wave of nostalgia that had swept over me. I wanted to recreate that experience. The initial experience of nostalgia had been almost like a drug. In my subsequent visits to the portrait I looked in my brother’s smiling eyes in the photo and caressed his cheeks in the picture frame. I was able to evoke and experience some nostalgia and I cried some silent tears. But I was never able to re-create the strength of that initial experience. Eventually, one day, as I sat contemplating the picture, I heard my brothers playing in the other room. My youngest brother was 3 at the time, the same age as my middle brother had been when the portrait I was holding had been taken. I realized that I still had a precious opportunity to experience the 3-year-old version of my youngest brother. I realized that during the time I spent alone with the portrait, I was missing out on the chance to appreciate the current versions of both of my brothers. When would it end? When my middle brother grew up and became 7 like me, would I be holding a picture of him at 5, wistfully remembering him at that age? Something in me recognized then that it wasn’t healthy to indulge in nostalgia. I put the picture frame away and left the room to play with my brothers. I stopped visiting the portrait after that. I suppose you could call those few weeks my Mirror of Erised phase. ..”It does not do well to dwell upon dreams and forget to live.”
It would be nice to think that I was able to fully integrate the lesson my nascent wisdom presented to my 7-year-old self that day. But I’m much more stubborn than that. I am still learning that lesson.
It’s strange. Sometimes I feel so old, so world-weary, like a 100-year old man looking out at society. I feel like I’ve experienced so much, passed through so many evolutions of thought, like there couldn’t possibly be anything left to do or see. And at other times I feel like a kid again, like I’m just beginning to live, like I’ve barely done anything yet. This life is full of contradictions.
I often think about a story I once read concerning the Buddha. It went something like this. Someone came up to ask the Buddha a question as he lay on his deathbed at 80 years of age. They asked him something like: “After all this time, after your 7 years of wandering in search of Truth, and then the subsequent 45 years of your teaching ministry, what does it feel like? What is your experience like after all this time?” And the Buddha softly replied: “I am always at the beginning.”
Isn’t that beautiful? I just think that is a really beautiful response.
But watch out, because it can be easy to hold the Buddha’s answer up as some type of ideal and get really neurotic about it. I might think: “Ah, yes, I need be open to the present moment without expectations as if I were at the beginning. I need to be fully open to my experience.” And then I might be hard on myself because I daydreamed for a while or wasted an afternoon on my computer. And then I think: “Man, I wasn’t very present today. I didn’t appreciate the sunset today. “
Like Klingsor, we can get wrapped up in our heads about the ephemerality of phenomena and we anguish over the extinction of each moment as it passes. “Nooo, the sun went down. Did I fully appreciate it? Did I suck all the metaphorical juice I could out of today? Did I Carpe Diem hard enough today?”
It seems silly, but I’m serious. We have a certain ideal of mindfulness, maybe, and it just turns into another neurotic pattern of thought. Really beginning to open towards awareness is more subtle than that. It’s watching all those neurotic thoughts in the paragraph above and not judging them. It’s experiencing my thoughts and emotions about the sunset similar to how I would experience the sunset itself, as an object in my experience. Notice the difference. Before, the thoughts and emotions were the subject of my experience. They were totally me, and I was at their mercy. There was no space between them and me. Experiencing thoughts more as an object in experience rather than the subject of experience can take lots of time, years, decades.
To begin to create some space you need to start sliding into more of a relaxed, centered stillness. This is a practice. We all practice this until we die. Effort is required, sure. But too much emphasis on effort and then you get into the whole accomplishing mode of doing things that our conditioning knows so well. The mind thinks: “I’m good at accomplishing things. Give me a technique and I’ll work hard at it.” But that’s not it. It’s a softer, subtler relaxing into awareness. It’s a letting go of yourself. Letting go of the idea that you can’t be too nostalgic or that you have to fully appreciate the sunset. This can sound just like mere relativism, but it’s not. Because relativism is just in the mind. It’s a rationalization, a way of thinking. We’re talking about a way of experience that goes beyond thinking.
For example, someone might think: “Ok, I shouldn’t be too caught up in my head, and at the same time I shouldn’t be too intent on not being too caught up in my head. Sooo what gives? I’m kind of in a catch-22. I can’t go left and I can’t go right, so where do I go? This doesn’t make sense. I’ll just give up on this esoteric stuff and live my life.”
But then they’re missing the point. The whole point is to work with awareness. To open to the awareness and to live less from the claustrophobic attachment to the personality. It’s more like discovering a third dimension. Instead of going left or right or straight ahead or backward, it’s as if one floats upward and gets to observe the playing board from a new perspective. It has to be learned by doing, by practice. It can’t really be explained well in words.
…
Look at me. Hah. I’m getting into teaching mode and going on about awareness and mindfulness again. I hope I’m not coming off as too preachy. This whole writing thing is more for me than anyone else. Kind of like a Marcus Aurelius Meditations type of thing. I can’t help myself. For me, all roads lead to this. All rivers empty to this ocean of awareness practice. It’s the most important thing for me. The most fundamental. To practice this. To cultivate this. Well, except when it’s not. Part of the time it’s the most important thing. And part of the time I’ve forgotten about awareness completely and I’m off on a different trip. You know Whitman’s famous refrain – “I contain multitudes.” That whole deal. I’m a bundle of contradictions. (Upon writing the previous words a thought quickly flits by, reminding me pedantically, although perhaps helpfully: “Yes, your personality is a bundle of contradictions, but the awareness in which your personality is held is not. If you think you’re a bundle of contradictions, it means you’re too attached to your personality.“) In any case, returning to my point before the thought interrupted me, and to sum up – I often forget my aspiration to practice relaxing into awareness, my aspiration to increase the consistency from which I practice operating from that space. But, sooner or later, I do tend to remember my aspiration, and I do tend to come back to it. It is an ebb and flow. I may not be entirely hopeless. Or…perhaps “I” may be hopeless after all, but when I am living from awareness, whether “I” am hopeless or not ceases to be an issue…Hehe. Ok ok. I’m beginning to get entirely too cheeky now. Best to stop here. I’ve been rambling long enough anyway. The dryer buzzer sounded some time ago, and I’d like to get my clothes home while they’re still warm so that I can fold them before they wrinkle. Onward into the rain.
Always at the Beginning 