more normal than not

There’s an old story about a Zen master talking to one of his students.  After offering the student a cup of tea, he starts to pour …but when he reaches the brim of the cup, he continues to fill the cup.  “Stop, master…the cup is full!” the student declares, tea running onto the table and down his leg.

At this point, the teacher tells the student, ” You are like this cup…full of your own opinions and conclusions.  How can you learn until you first empty the cup?”

I am afraid that I might have a second cup handy to handle the overflow.

It is easier to build a new container for the extra than it is to get rid of it.  I’m not sure why it is so hard for me to “empty the cup”…by choice, I seem to want to hold on to a lot of things that get in my way.  I curse the wastebasket I left in the middle of the room…finally moving it and realizing that I didn’t have to trip over it in the dark…realizing how easy it all was when I finally took some action to fix the problem. Until something changes, it’s “the way we’ve always done it”…and I continue to work around an issue that’s “fixable” until I decide or someone else decides to fix it.

There is a story about a holiday ham.  The man in the story loved his hams…prepared the same way every time.  Each time the ham was being prepared, his wife would cut the end off the ham before she put it into the oven.  Finally, one day he said, “Why do you cut the end off the ham?  Seems kind of wasteful…”  His wife replied, “Well…that’s the way my mother always did it…you like my mother’s hams don’t you?”

The man replied, “Well…sure I do..they’re delicious…but that still doesn’t answer the question.”

His wife said, “well…why don’t you call Mom.  Maybe she can give you an answer to your question”.

So he called his mother in law.  When she picked up the phone, he asked her the question about the ham.  She told him that “she didn’t really know…it was just the way it had always been done in her family. Why didn’t he call her mother and ask her why she cut the end off the ham?”.

So, sure he was getting closer to an answer, he called his wife’s grandma. “Hi”, he said, “I have a question for you.  Every time we have a ham, my wife cuts off the end.  Apparently, her mother did the same thing for years.  They say that you taught them to do it.  Why do you do that?  What does it do for the ham?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line…and then Grandma said, “Well…my pan was too short.  I had to cut the end off to make it fit.”

I know how to cook a ham….the same way I’ve always done it…and nobody’s going to tell me different.

My cup is full.

I love books.  I should expand on that thought and say that I love actual books.  I have an e-reader and I think it’s pretty cool to be able to read a download…but I can’t fool myself into thinking it’s an actual book. I’m reading what I know is something they call a book…but it doesn’t look or smell like the books I know.  Turning a page on a screen just doesn’t feel the same as holding a collection of paper with words printed on it in my hands.  Sometimes if I need to find a real creative way of looking at it, it makes me feel like one of the apes in the movie 2001…clambering around the obelisk…unable to process this new thing in their lives.

I have a big collection of books.  When you bring them home a handful at a time, over the course of 30 or 40 years, the pile can grow to an unmanageable size.  It’s not hard to find yourself pushed out of your own house…and everyone in it paying for your interest in a too wide-ranging list of subjects.

Recently, we remodeled and I got rid of a bunch of books.  I actually got rid of truckloads of books. It was a lot of books that I got rid of.  I think that at the time, I was pretty traumatized…but now I’d be hard pressed to name any of the ones that I got rid of.  It made a small dent in the pile.

It is a lot harder to take a book to the book sale or to a thrift store than it is to press delete.  The e-reader is a boon for the minimalist lifestyle.  If your Nook ever smells musty, something in your life is seriously wrong.  The pages of the digital files will never yellow…never harbor black mold…never tip off the coffee table…but will never feel like a book, either.

I think that it’s my perception of what it means to own a book on my “electronic reading device” versus an actual physical book that’s really starting to kick in lately.  It cheapens the value of it all…it’s not a part of my experience with books so it doesn’t have the magic that discovering a title that I’d been looking for has.  I don’t remember ever feeling my heart race over my good fortune after doing a successful Amazon search for an ebook I was looking for.  Something so easy to find…and so easy to delete…just doesn’t feel right.

I deliver the mail.  I deliver the physical mail that people still write to other people.  Legal notices, fliers about free pizzas, magazines, passports, packages full of surprises of all kinds…it’s all real and all capable of giving me a paper cut at any time.  I don’t think that people are going to keep a file on their computer filled with all their love emails (unless you’re General Petraeus, I guess) …it’s too hard to perfume them and wrap them up with a piece of red satin. We need the physical thing for it to have any importance long-term.

I can’t imagine anyone saying, “Ohhhh, my…I remember this tweet.  Remember when Grandpa sent us this tweet when he was still alive?  Oh, what a tweet that was.”

Every generation has a chance to rail against what they think they’re losing.  When I was younger, it seemed like time moved slow enough that I could believe that nothing was ever going to change…now it seems like it’s all speeding up.  We’ll miss books someday. Maybe they’ll be an archaic curiosity, something we trot out like a fossil from the sandy cliffs…maybe they’ll all end up in a box with the old 8-tracks, I don’t really know.

I love books.  The must and smell and falling apart and stained covers…the dogeared pages and some other person’s highlighting…the randomness of finding a used copy of a treasure that’s had a life of its own.  I love it. I hope it sticks around for a while.

My cousin gave a copy of this book to my mother back in the early 1970’s.  She read it…and later let me read it.  I was pretty young and unformed at the time…and this story of the commune Ideath had a big impact on my developing worldview.

Richard Brautigan was a troubled man who seemed to respond to his harsh early years with an innocent approach to his writing.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the poets known for his work during the earlier Beat period and an editor and proprietor of City Lights bookstore, said of Brautigan,

“As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don’t think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people.”

I think it’s this innocence that I was, and am, drawn to.  Water seeks its own level…and even though, after all these years, I’ve seen enough to know that the world is not always an innocent place…I’m drawn to a benevolent way of looking at it.  Richard Brautigan might have been trying to create an idealistic world in his head…and his writing was right for an idealistic time like the 60’s.

In the early 80’s, Brautigan’s writings were maybe not seen as relevant any more.  His writing was tied to an era…represented an era to some degree…and when the era had passed his importance had passed also. In 1984, at the age of 49, he committed suicide with a 44 magnum pistol. His body was discovered a month or so later by a private investigator.  Despite rumors to the contrary, he did not leave a suicide note.

He suffered from depression and alcoholism most of his adult life…his childhood was about as rough as it gets…but his writing was gentle and full of humor.  Even after he started to slide off the radar of popular culture in our country, he had a big following in Japan and was popular in Europe.  Much of his writing was compatible with the ideas of Zen Buddhism, so his popularity in Japan made sense. When I was a child I didn’t understand any of this…had no knowledge of who the man was who wrote the book about the “hippies”…but I loved this book.  It had short chapters that read like poems…chapters that painted a picture and left room for my imagination to fill in the blank parts.

My mother wasn’t a hippy.  She did want to put giant flower stickers on our new Fairlane station wagon…my Dad talked her out of it…but she wasn’t a hippy.  In California, it was easy to have a little hippy living inside of you and be pretty straight-laced…easy to be a “covert hippy” in attitude and a horn rimmed accountant in execution.  This book is one of the artifacts from my childhood…not as important as most of the events that really shaped me…but still a part of what matters to me.  Many of his books are still in print…and available through any bookstore.

Six days a week, I make the same lunch and carry it to work.  I know that the chips are in the basket on top of the refrigerator, the juice is in the door of the refrigerator, the cold pack is in the freezer, and the peanut butter is in the jar. If we haven’t had a chance to shop, I make something else…but for the most part I’m a creature of habit…freed by repetition.

I could, and often do, make this lunch in my sleep.  I eat my lunch in the same place everyday…at about the same time…always just about the same except for the wild turkey sightings and the occasional hawk.

What can I say?  I’m a postman…same is my middle name.  If boring things didn’t become automatic, I think I’d probably go insane.

Other people might say, “variety is the spice of life…why so much same?”….and it would be a good question.  Maybe I keep some things the same to free up the chance for variety in other parts of my life…maybe I’m just lazy and unimaginative…I don’t really know.

Helen and Scott Nearing, authors and simple living pioneers, believed in same.  Much of their life was routine….the same breakfast every morning, eaten out of a wooden bowl with a wooden spoon…the same chores season after season…but their lives were anything but boring.  They had a full life of necessary routine. Both of them lived to be reasonably old…Scott passed when he was 100 (by fasting)…and Helen died when she crashed her truck into a tree at the age of 91. They authored more than 50 books…built many stone structures on their Vermont homestead….lectured extensively…and somehow found the time to eat the same breakfast out of a wooden bowl every morning.

I’m not advocating repetition for the sake of repetition. I’m not saying that eating your breakfast from a wooden bowl is going to make you holy. What I am saying is that we have the ability to prioritize…and if our priorities take us towards something that is more important to us than eating a different sandwich 365 days a year that it’s nothing to apologize for. The “how could you live like that?” question could just as well be answered by saying, “how could you not live like that?”.  Choice is the final frontier…it’s the only real power we have anymore.

Helen and Scott wrote a book called “Living the Good Life” in the 1950’s.  It wasn’t called “Buying the Stuff to Get Real Simple” or “Gearing Up for Good”…it was just “Living the Good Life”…and it became kind an early primer for all the folks in search of an alternative way of living in the 60’s.  They balanced the conflicting worlds of living a quiet life…and of being spokespeople for quiet living.  It was their choice to live that life.

Many religious disciplines talk about repetition and getting closer to God by freeing your mind to concentrate on Him.  The “chop wood, carry water” approach is one of them…”pray without ceasing”…I’m sure there’s many others.  I don’t think that making the same sandwich every morning is my personal form of spiritual obedience…it’s not some strange peanut butter ablution that purifies me for the perfect communion of a day of delivering mail…it’s just making the familiar lunch every day so that I don’t nod off mid-route in a hypoglycemic coma. If any of the other stuff happens along the way…well, that’s just the GRAVY.

Helen and Scott Nearing lived a good and simple life by design. They “set the wheel in motion” and rode it all out until the end…and influenced generations with their philosophies….both by word and example.  The Nearings were consistent…and while many would say that the repetitive parts of their lives was boring and unnecessary, it was always real and in service to a life of thought and contemplation. I am going to have to really work hard at being more mindful when I’m smearing my thick layer of peanut butter on Monday if I’m going to catch up with them in that department.