To walk or to sit

 

Paul Vereshack, retired Canadian psychotherapist, wrote: “Finally we have a per­son­ality which comes to be profoundly complex. It towers into the sky on a base of untruth, ‘I am this and I am not that,’ or ‘I am that and I am not this,’ all untrue. We shall come to see that men and women are all things. There is no combustion engine without fire and heat, no matter how gently the wheels may turn.”* My version of this insight is that people are not good or bad, kind or cruel, loving or hating, caring or indifferent, smart or dumb, wise or ignorant, sophisticated or naïve, adult or child. We are the molecu­lar mess without One Nature, without identity, without labels. I have seen a facet of this in extremis in myself in the last year and as I approach my 70^th birthday. Two fully contra­dictory parts live together: a feeling of bleak uncaring, of letting myself deteriorate to sick­ness and toward death; and a feeling of vitality, or self-preser­vation and grim-to-bright robust­ness. Both feelings exist, equal in strength, one being ephemerally present in the other’s ephemeral absence.

I pride myself on being a psychological problem solver, but I have found this problem unmoving. I try to see which I am: force or effeteness, life instinct or death instinct. I’ve tried to mentally separate myself from my wife, who is both positive and negative influ­ences, to see what I may be as an alone person, an individual. This brings no answer.

One way the conundrum manifests: I picture, starting on the upcoming birth date, walk­ing several miles every night, growing stronger even into my last years. It feels good, spir­it­ual. Then I picture, as easily, continuing my sloth, an old man sitting nightly, maybe walking the dog at our mutual slumberous pace. Which will it be?

I’d say that what we’re looking at is one example of the perennial conflict of the human psyche: the meaning we lost that stalemates our birthright. We are not like photons or electrons whose nature is movement, even at absolute zero. The spirit ceases move­ment when there is no love early on, but the brain has other, lesser forms of impetus. There may be the promise of love, or later love, or the stimuli of the world, or an early internalized lesson from a parent, efforts of flight that challenge gravity. We are now life and death, reality and hope, vitality and vacuum in one. We exert will against the void. I think this would be the universe’s nature if soul and heart were embedded in it: All those particles of brightness racing forever, going every­where yet nowhere.

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* http://www.paulvereshack.com/helpme/chapt20.html#9.