Post #94: Indian Summer

16 Feb. 2024

“Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.”

—Dylan Thomas

     There are seasons for everything in life. Working and playing, laughing and grieving, living and dying. Only learning and love seem truly to cross the lines into something else, something greater, something possibly timeless. Even grace can look seasonal, though probably more in appearance than in reality—a disputed point.

     I don’t know that the Indian summer I am mulling over is an age, or not rather a mood that can strike for various reasons at different times in adult life. It would be surprising to see it in a twenty-year-old, even more so not to discover it lurking in the shadows around fifty; but I am not concerned with pinning numbers to the phenomenon, only with pondering its significance.

     During the Indian summer, the bright and bountiful season stages a last comeback before giving way to the season of falling: maturity has brought a richness and depth of color to the leaves that can be dazzling, a veritable marvel to behold; but it is a melancholy time too, because the splendor cannot last. Death is already in the leaves, coloring them so, even as they are holding up for a little while longer—who knows how long. The end is in sight, as in contemplating a rose in its very last moments of bloom, already darkening and perhaps blackening a little at the edges, on the very cusp of wilting and losing its petals—a moving sight, and a heartbreaking one. (Autumn and winter may have their own charms; but these are hard to appreciate from the perspective of the slanting rays of the Indian summer. True, the sun never disappears, it just recedes from view and gives less light and  warmth; but the ensuing darkness and cold can still be harrowing.)

     It may well be that the process of gradually losing something will one day look, in hindsight, harder to bear than having to do without the cherished thing, just as the process of gaining is usually more gratifying than the enduring possession. It has been said that human beings can and will adjust even to catastrophic changes, and that a “homeostatic” level of happiness is usually restored after six months or so. Perhaps that is true, though I don’t see it happening so smoothly in my own case. Economists too speak of bad news getting “priced-in” and suggest that continuing uncertainties can wreak even more havoc with valuations than definite setbacks.

     Since physical decline already commences, albeit very slowly and subtly at first, in the earlier twenties, we may typically spend two-thirds or more of our lives with it (blessed as we are in our average life expectancies). At first the descent is hardly noticeable, though troubling enough to the young: not many turn 21 in eager anticipation of 25, to say nothing of 30. Nonetheless the slope is generally gentle enough that for a considerable time (again, I don’t wish to commit to a number), the most unsettling or upsetting thing is perhaps not so much the losses already incurred, but the disconcerting knowledge that the gnawing at our vitality will never end until life itself does. Even if you could make your peace with where you have arrived at, your position will keep eroding further, day by day, year by year. And while it may be possible to compensate for physical decline, to a point, with more welcome fruits of the years, a time must come for all of us when even that is no longer possible—perhaps in the Indian summer, certainly in autumn proper—and you can only go downhill anymore, unambiguously and mercilessly towards the great void.

     Perhaps this picture of poignant beauty mixed with pain also tells us something important about the nature of human life, and about what the Buddhists mean by Dukkha. There is undeniable beauty in those glorious shades of red and yellow and brown; there are equally unmistakable bruises and scars, and sure signs of vital forces waning. But autumn has not come, not quite; the real calamities are, as yet, a prospect not a presence. Even so, they cast their shadows over the scene. (Dukkha, let us remember, is not only raw suffering; it covers the whole spectrum of dissatisfaction, grave and silly, acute and anticipated, that beset sentient and thinking beings in a world of impermanence. Whatever you cling to past its time will be torn from your clutching fingers; take heed that you do not also lose your hands, or your arms, in the process.)

     What are we to do, then? Live only in the moment, as one sometimes hears, the power of Now unburdened by any thought about tomorrow? But can that really be right: how would doing so be living with full awareness, when what comes next is such an important aspect of the unfolding scene, even if we can never be sure how things will turn out? Perhaps better not to think at all, or at least not too much; but then again, how would that be rising to our full human potential? I wonder. Perhaps what we need to find is a way to life, present to the now of course, but also reflective and able to look back and ahead, that can take in the full view of the doomed beauty without flinching, letting it touch the heart with pain and grief if need be.

     In the background, there looms a bigger question still, namely whether the purpose of the Path really is to make our pains go away, as we commonly imagine, or not rather to make them more acceptable and bearable. Only, what is an acceptable pain? Is it a mere oxymoron, or can our own miseries be smiled at and observed placidly, as just another manifestation of what it means to be alive in the human realm? Enjoy your suffering, as I’ve been told before, with a big therapeutic and priestly smile (#11).

     Allowing things to go wrong, to fall apart even, without resentment: is that the meaning of the Path, or one of them? Reminding yourself, as a friend described it to me when he was going about his daily business during a recent visit to his beloved hometown (Cracow), how very unreasonable it is of us to expect that all our doings of the day should work out according to our wishes. How could they: is the world there for satisfying your every whim? Hardly. It is remarkable, when you think about it, how much does work out without our even noticing, because we take it so much for granted. A dangerous ease, however, because it fosters the illusion that such might be the natural state of things, when in fact it is the fruit of great and constant human effort—ever-renewed energy that must be continuously invested to keep the threats of entropy, anarchy, and breakdown at bay. It is a great human accomplishment we have before us, this relative peace, prosperity, and stability we see around us. Far from perfect, needless to say, but nothing to scoff at.

     I’ve mentioned grace, taking the term in no very specific theological sense. What I have in mind is something more general than any one system of faith, namely how, on a few precious—oh so very precious—occasions in life, be they days or nights, everything lines up for a few perfect moments of bliss, ecstasy, triumph, glory, or whatever label you want to give to the gods smiling upon you for a bit. Alas, far too many factors go into such a lucky constellation for it to be stable; it cannot last. There must soon be a reversion to the mean, as a statistician might put it, that is to say, a return to a more average state of things, as a simple matter of probability. To put it brutally, such paradisical states are too good to remain true for long, and one of the toughest aspects of the Path is finding oneself East of Eden again after a spell of rapture in the Garden. Those blessings do happen, and they too are an important part of the journey; but nothing will trip you up like trying to bring them back by repeating what you did before, or experimenting with other stratagems to get the better of elusive grace. It doesn’t work.

We cannot make moments of grace happen, and when we try to force the blessing hand to open, we will make it close and retract. What we can do is to be ready for the redeeming touches when they are ready for us; we don’t find grace, it finds us. Even to go looking for it is to risk closing the doors. At the same time, as we cannot “fall off” the Path, only turn away from it with real intent and determination (#90), so we are not, I think, simply cut off from grace for no good reason. When we are unable to see the sun any longer, hidden as it is behind the clouds, or feel its warmth anymore, or receive anything noticeable by channels that we may have witnessed overflowing before, grace has not therefore disappeared from the world, or departed from us. These dark, cloudy, and cold stretches are a lot less fun than basking in the sunshine; but life cannot be all about our delights. Is that not the whole point of the Path, and of all faith and acceptance?