Classical guitar. Skies lacquer black, slick black, lake black; polished. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps a fraying sailor-suit blue. Perhaps navy-grey and garlanded with smoke-orange about the horizon, like the eyes of a heterochromiac, like the fire that rings the heterochromiac's pupil before being doused by the sea-storm of the iris. Hot tea, decaffeinated and very milky.
"Consolation resides where we, having ventured out into all these dangerous experiments of individual living, at last [find ourselves] coming back, and swallowing our pride, and humbly acquiescing in a social order that is bigger than ourselves." -- Roger Scruton.
There is something that pulls us back, that rightly pulls us back to a place of community, to a place of humility, to a place where we divest the garments we donned to mark ourselves apart from our fellow man (whether these garments were donned originally for defense or attack, for fear's sake or for pride's, does not matter), and become part of a whole. The further I stray from humility, from the acknowledgement that I am not a piece-apart but rather a part-of-a-whole, the more troubled I become. I must remember this. How can I make myself remember?
The following from a journal kept five years back:
4-18-11
Do not conceive of yourself as in competition with the world, Sarah. You do not have to be so. Even when it all seems like a grand game of the prisoner's dilemma and everybody is defecting, don't ever defect yourself. Always cooperate. The most to be lost in cooperating is your life. In defecting you risk far greater losses, namely your very will to live. Hush the ego. Hush the voice that begs for distinction over your fellow man. That is a voice of fear, a voice born of the insecurities inherent in trying to compete with the world. You no longer need it. You are choosing to cooperate. It is the most liberating, joy-inspiring, happiness-inducing choice you could ever make. You are freeing yourself to rejoice in all that is around you, to add your voice to the universal ode to joy without having to worry about whether it is off-key or less sonorous than your neighbor's. You are not in competition with your neighbor and thereby are no longer in need of fear of him, or, to allay such fears, superiority over him. What is left? To love him. Love is what remains when you have stripped away the husk of competition. Love and all the inestimable joy that attends it. Do not fear cooperating though all else are defecting. It is the sure and solitary gateway to joy. My heart aches. I shall love.
We learn lessons and then we lose them, and find them, and lose them again. We are continually having to humble ourselves at the feet of our past. And this takes so much pride-swallowing, for it is one thing to be ignorant of a lesson one has not learned, but quite another to remain ignorant of a lesson one has learned multiple times over. But swallow my pride I must. Provided I am not as I am meant to be, I shall vary even as the seasons do, and like as not be five-hundred different selves in the course of each year. It is only once we draw closer to who we are meant to be that we can draw closer to consistency; only then can we retain our lessons. Until such a point, we must learn the lessons again and again, and remind ourselves of them over and over to stave off the risk of forgetting, and practice their teachings in earnest, for this is the only way in which to draw closer to whom we are meant to be, to draw closer to whom we most truly are.
I have been reminded of this lesson this evening. Let me work with all my might not to forget it.
