In the morning when I rise...

Today I succumbed to a sickness. Nothing horridly terrible, mind you; just a little congestion, cough, and soar throat. Still, a little sickness goes a long way to making the morning's rise difficult. Fortunately, I had made plans, and had to be out and about my business by 8:30 at the latest, so when I awoke at 7:30, I knew what I had to do. Unfortunately, I didn't really want to do it.

As someone who has often struggled with the business of happiness, the morning has become a symbolic struggle for our need to exert ourselves in order to fulfill ourselves. For many, I assume, this struggle is nothing more than a ritual of the translation of the self from sleeping to waking. The road out of the great unconscious is straight, and the way is broad for those souls who happen upon a well-adjusted temperament. For myself, possessing innately a less than positive outlook on things, the morning's rise is difficult. Yet I have found that the difficulty lies not so much in the circumstances surrounding the act of rising so much as the simple fact that for some, rising is a matter of instinct. For others, myself included, rising is a matter of choice.

I remember a certain time in my life when I less frequently chose to pursue the path I do now. I remember times when the simple act of getting out of bed seemed unnecessary, when I debated with myself at length upon the comparative benefits of a life of activity versus a somnolent revery among pillows and blankets. Needless to say, this time in my life was also quite a miserable one. It was it this very point, however, that I ran across the wise words of Marcus Aurelius:

In he morning when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present- I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in my bed-clothes and keep myself warm?- But this is more pleasant.- Do you exist then simply to take your pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion?

At the time, these words struck me as being full of a sort of wisdom I, at the time, was capable of understanding, but incapable of fully comprehending, of assimilating, and putting into practice. I know have come to realize that the difference lies in the weight of importance that we put on our presence in the world. Is my being active in the world a deed of importance greater than the sum total of the enjoyment I derive therefrom? Is there something to my being in the world that gives a sort of joy transcendent of the simple pleasures of simplicity and quietism. It is pleasurable to stay in bed, because it is easy to do so, but is it not the case that some pleasures come only after great effort is expended? Were we made for the world to come to us, to fall into our lap, to offer us the things we need in the time we want them, or does life require something of us? In the morning, when I rise unwillingly, may I remember that there is a world beyond the horizon of my sheets, a cruel, cold, hard place, but a place where I belong nonetheless. May I remember this, keeping in mind above all, that it is only in being in the place where I belong that I will truly find the rest that I long for.

Memory of the Presence

I've been remarkably sentimental the last few days; perhaps it's the sweet reminiscence of the life of my beloved Grandfather whose passing exactly one week ago has left me yearning for a presence which is no longer seen. Like the allegory of old, "At night, I sought the one whom my soul loves / I searched, but did not find him." Grief is, as it were, a manifestation of our conditioning instinct: We grew so accustomed to the presence, we nearly took it for granted. But just as soon as that happened, the presence was gone, and we were left searching for it like Diogenes with his lantern.

Bereavement is like the awkward feeling every one of us has experienced as children as children when we lost a tooth. Initially, the shock and pain, the burning sensation are so overpowering that we are incapacitated. But time heals the wound, and we go on with our lives. Yet every day goes by, and we find ourselves always sensing the void left. The tongue stumbles around in the darkness of the mouth, groping for the place where the tooth had been, but it finds nothing. Somehow we are aware of the fact, rationally, that we have lost a tooth. But to grasp something rationally is completely different from grasping it with our whole being. We how truly small it was, but the place where that tooth had been feels to us as if it were a gaping hole. Suddenly the whole seems to our mind to be even larger than our mouth ever felt before. Here is a profound mystery: the pain of loss always seems greater than the joy of gain. Love lost always seems worse than a life lived without love---ever.

Yet for me, sweet memory fills the void we experience when loss of a loved one occurs, and it comforts us like the feeling of a cotton ball filling up the raw socket. Cotton will never make a tooth, but it can make up for one, at least in some ways. Likewise, memory is an image of thing, like a photograph of a lost friend. We never cling to the picture when the reality is near; but when the reality of the thing is not, it's image and likeness take on aspects of the reality of a thing for us.

Over these last days, little things trigger the memories that flow like warm water over the head. One such occasion was the discovery of a little book of my Grandfather's in the basement bathroom of his house. It was a small, hardbound copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. A stoic to the very end.