My hippie moment #2

There will always be someone coming along who changes the world. Whether an Aristotle or a Hitler, Einstein, Gates-Jobs – somebody will change the channel of the river we flow down, though the destination will be the same. Actually, some changers will create a different destination – one’s inner sense of meaning that travels on through one’s years. Hitler changed meaning for many people. But I doubt that the invention of the computer or smartphone or automobile can change any person’s fundamental capacity for happiness or unhappiness, her deepest center. Idea systems – Platonist or Marxism or Christianity or Ayn Rand’s Objectivism – can alter an impressionable person, but not someone who thinks on his or her own. I was once a Randian capitalist-egoist-rationalist, but it faded away decades ago.

Mostly we are each alone in a populated world of objects and events, discoveries and wars, politics and the great classics and popular songs, colored lights and news stories and the millennium, where all of it is just the dim backdrop to our own life. None of these fantastic things gives us meaning. We have it from other sources.

Music is deceptive. I can listen to some classical piece and while it plays I’ll feel like a different person, from ganglion to soul. A Gershwin turns me into a worldly New Yorker of the 1920’s. Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto puts me in a universe where a celestial choir does sound and reveal the noble meaning of everything. A Grieg Lyric Piece or folk tune and I am a poetic peasant, Norwegian mountain variety. Chopin, and I am the drastic child who was ahead of his time in neurotic feeling. But end of piece, these changes evaporate immediately, completely.

I may be less susceptible to internalizing meanings than many people, partly because of my dysthymic placidity, partly because I no longer look for them. The dysthymia means that baseball or travel or possessions don’t give me a powerful feeling. Only two things do: my marriage and my work. When I’m sitting with clients, though, an instinct always kicks in that says benefits like a relationship, a job, a relocation, a hobby, a pet, a clean bill of health, are good meanings. I know these are right, though they are better than I can do.

I think one thing could give me another piece of meaning. If someone were to invent a personal starship that traveled with the “spooky action” Einstein abhorred: vast distances instantly, or pretty much that fast. I think that would do it – seeing new sights and always going toward the mystery that no one will ever solve. But . . . .

I doubt that I’d be able to leave my wife or my work.