Thoughts, words, and events connect and resonate
I’ve just finished Winter, my first taste of the work of novelist Ali Smith. The book portrays Sophia and Iris, sisters who reacted in vastly different ways to the world they were born and grew up in, and lived extremely different lives. An aging Sophia now suffers from visual disturbances, among other health challenges. Living alone, she is estranged from her sister and semi-estranged from her son Art.
Panicked about the visit he is about to make to his mother, Art brings Lux into the story by paying her to stand in for the girlfriend who has just broken up with him.
Lux, though she is “not English,” knows a great deal about English culture including Shakespeare.
Her own history, like her current life, is utterly different from Art’s. Yet this stranger, arriving on Christmas Eve at Sophia’s home, helps bridge the yawning gap between her and Iris. Simply by being who she is, Lux inspires Art to widen his perspective and open himself to ideas formerly resisted. As the new year progresses, her influence continues to make a positive difference in his life.
The struggles of Smith’s protagonists plummet us down through the bones to the heart of the human condition. One line that stood out for me voiced the thorny rhetorical question so crucial at this moment in history. Which mythologies are we prepared to buy into?
Oddly, this evoked a recent conversation with a friend who’d just finished Louise Penny’s The Madness of Crowds. After telling me the title referred to an 1841 book by Charles Mackay about crowd psychology, she quoted a few lines that had particularly resonated for her. One was a quotation from Thoreau: “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
These lines came back to me yesterday. Prefacing a dinner we were cooking for friends, I carried out some energy work on the one about to face surgery. Afterwards, I found myself repeating the above line to him. Hearing the words issue from my own mouth impressed on me anew how every pair of eyes, every soul, ever intelligence, can see the same thing differently.
Considering the diversity of interpretations of what’s “out there,” so to speak, this a rather shocking idea. Yet it has encouraging implications. Cultivating right attitudes determines what we see, and thus what we think. Hopeful and loving thoughts in turn draw our emotions into a more positive place. Learning to consciously choose attitudes of acceptance and neutrality over rage and judgment is a worthwhile effort. Applied over time, this discipline gives us the power to generate an inner peace that radiates out to those around us.
Indeed, it could be argued that this spiritual practice, hard though it may be, is the most reliable kind of political action. It depends on nothing outside our control, but only on the considerable resources we have within. To learn not to doubt the power of these resources is a worthwhile effort. Mastering this skill frees us. No longer feeling compelled to concern ourselves with the external forces that impinge on us, we can face the challenge issued decades ago by Mahatma Gandhi. As we increasingly observe how outer reality mirrors what lies within, we can attend to the essential task of living the change we hope to see in the world.