Journal of a Soul 73

Grave Thoughts

There is definitely a type of person who could properly be called the cemetery-frequenter. On initial reflection, one might imagine that those who come to this hallowed and sobering spot might be old or ageing, morbid or morose - in short, in want of considerable cheering up. Nothing could be further from the truth. The cemetery-goer comes from all age groups and is not as sombre and as cheerless as one might at first think.

I must hasten to add that I do not belong to that committed fellowship, that group of “sorry souls” who are obsessive funeral-attendees or graveyard-frequenters. However, while I could never see myself ever becoming a prospective member of such a sorry group, I certainly acknowledge the need we have to face that most modern of repressions at least on a certain regular basis – the repression of death and all its depressing accoutrements.

I read recently of some famous person - someone in the public eye and whose name I forget - who said that he simply hated going to graveyards because he preferred to remember the person as they were rather than as a heap of clay. To my mind he had got it all wrong. No one goes to see just a heap of clay. His statement strikes me as one arising more out of fear than from simple preference.

Fingal Cemetery where my father is buried

My first visit to this graveyard was one by way of coping with the reality of my father's death, way back in February 1993. It gave me, then, a focal point for my grief in some pointed way. Previously, it did also make a difference to see the burial, pick up a fistful of clay, let it fall, hear it rasp against the wooden coffin lid.  In other words, the sheer naturalness of the whole ritual brought a certain much needed equanimity. When I came here on my first visit, after the funeral, the clay was newly heaped and fresh. Shortly thereafter it had settled and the weeds had newly sprung. It had become more solid under foot. For the year after my father’s demise, my mother had always shown interest in the progress of subsidence. I remember my father saying that under no circumstances would he wish to be cremated. That way, he said, he could imagine the resurrection of the body - simple country faith. Some of us are far too sophisticated these days, far too urban or urbane even, perhaps cynical or even sceptical, to entertain such naive, rural and childish notions. However, he had a right to his wishes and a stronger right to his faith.  I remember promising way back then how I would never let the weeds grow on that small plot of clay.  I have not lived up to that promise, more to my regret.

This morning before the inevitable and persistent Irish rain thoroughly soaked every inch of life, I decided to come here after a long absence. The sun had just begun to shine and there were three or four or more people visiting graves. Reading the headstones could almost become a hobby. Some father had written two lines of poetry for his son whose birth and death had coincided on the same day. Another proclaimed three deaths, all of them within weeks of birth. A teenage boy was praying at the farther end of the graveyard. A mother and daughter were caring for another plot, planting flowers, renewing life. Further up the path, workmen were laying the concrete surround in preparation for a headstone. A spirit of enterprise and care reigned.

I searched out the spot where Pat McCormack, a former student, was buried. A twenty or twenty one year old, and now nearly twenty years buried. I said a prayer. Fresh flowers are always on his well-cared-for grave. Further down a newly dug grave: loving hands will care for that sad little spot and eyes will watch the settling of the soil and hands will transform it into a happier little plot, full of cherished memories and mementoes. I count it strange now that I never really knew that boy at all, a quiet lad that sat at the back of the class for two years. He had never called any attention to himself. I am still surprised indeed that he had been so academic and had achieved such great results, but maybe that was what was at fault, that he was all too clever and emotionally so fragile, too fragile for such a hurtful world  But yet, he is at rest, his questions answered. He lies at the still point of existence forever. The mystics only taste briefly of ecstasy in this life – he lives in its fullness.

Further down an old retired priest whom I know was making his determined way towards the gate and his dog was running happily at his side. He is a great animal lover and is a member of the ISPCA. I read recently where some psychologist said that there is a short step from cruelty to animals to cruelty to human beings. I can see the truth in this contention. A great peace reigned in this cemetery today. Or to put it more precisely that great peace is now reigning in my heart. Like Peter on Mount Tabor I could wish that it last forever. But, as someone so wisely and figuratively put it long ago: the mystic cannot stay on the mountain all day long. He had to, like me, attend to other more practical concerns - enough musing for one day.

Journal of a Soul 67

The Passage of Time

Interesting evergreen tree at Newbridge House, Donabate, Co. Dublin

The passage of time seems to be quicker the more one ages.  Indeed, as a friend of mine who is a mathematician stated: "This is quite logical because  to a 56 year old person like myself on the cusp of his 57th birthday another year is in comparative terms a mere one 56th or a one 57th of your life depending on how you calculate it.  One way or another ageing is inevitable.  Recently, I was quite intrigued when a past pupil who was about 19 declared that he would like to live forever.  Another young man in our company replied that such "would never happen and that his wishful thinking was in every sense delusional." St Augustine once defined time as "the measure of change." The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus averred that "one can never step into the same river twice," and further that everything was in "a state of flux." I was amused, as I say, by the wishful, if delusional, thinking of my young friend.  I thought to myself how great it was to be so innocent and full of enthusiasm for life. This was also quite ironic as we were in a local hostelry imbibing some alcoholic beverages in the wake of a commemorative service for one of his friends who had ended his life by suicide. Obviously this latter person had found living life totally unbearable.

The Importance of Philosophy

Philosophy is more an activity and a process than a learned body of reflections on life. While it may be the latter as is witnessed by all the countless books written on the subject, it is so much more.  It is the activity of questioning to the nth degree everything around us, the nature of the universe; what knowledge may be, if there is any such thing as Truth in an objective sense or is it always relative; what love, faith, hope and charity may be, indeed what emotions may mean; what the purpose and meaning of the life we humans experience is and so on and so forth.  There is also a philosophy of every subject under the sun.  We can surely ask what the nature of numbers is and what we are at when we do mathematics.  Are the tenets of mathematics universal and true everywhere in the universe.  We believe so and can adduce reasons to substantiate our contentions.  We can study the history of science and also its philosophy. What is the difference between practical knowledge and scientific knowledge? Is all scientific knowledge empirical?  In many cases, yes, but both at the subatomic and astronomical level, no - we need to use very abstract and much speculative thought there, but such thought is no less rigorous than the process of arriving at conclusions from empirical evidence. There are so many questions we humans can ask and none may be as important as the moral one as to what are right and wrong actions.  What is morality and why need we act in such and such way and so on. My young friend obviously had never encountered philosophy, that is, the radical questioning of one's own thoughts and opinions.  What would it mean to live forever?  Follow the thought experiment through, young man. Would you keep ageing and ageing and yet never die? Even simple tools eventually wear out? Humans are made of material stuff which breaks down.  Does not the simple physical law of entropy imply that everything eventually burns itself out? If we never died what would birth mean at all? There obviously would be no point in birth if there were no death! How would we deal with the population explosion? These are all philosophical questions, which at first glance may seem somewhat silly, but on reflection clarify superficial thought and silly shoddy thinking.  Essentially to live implies within its ambit the process of dying itself.  In fact, to live is to die.  Think of any simple plant or flower you might have at home or in the garden.  It grows, blooms and eventually dies.  I remember meeting a most interesting man who owned a pet shop.  One could see his total commitment to and love of animals of all varieties.  He opined that it was important for youngsters to keep pets, to nourish and see them grow and eventually die.  Keeping pets, he felt, taught children to accept that death and dying are parts of life.  As an animal, albeit human, I consume food, burn it and transform it into energy to keep my body going.  It is obvious that my body will wear out, break down and die - such is only natural.

Reflections on Death and Dying 

Having been brought up in a rural setting one could say that I am somewhat at home with the cycle of the seasons, with the sowing of seeds, the growth of plants, their cultivation and harvesting and so on in a never-ending cycle.  Within that scenario, death and dying are seen as a natural process. The peasant folk had and obviously still have their traditions like the waking of the dead - the celebration of the life of the departed one about the open coffin that is positioned centrally in the house of the departed.  Within this context not alone is grief made bearable but the sting is taken out of death at least for a short while.  These ancient rituals grew up within various communities as they attempted to help the grieving party cope with their sorrow and to make some social or communal sense of the experience of death.

And yet, existentially we all face our own extinction in a very private way - we each of us have to make some personal sense of our mortality, that is, if we are at least half thinking or even semi-reflective persons, as quite simply, no matter how many or how few are our family or friends, we die alone.  It is, alas, a journey only we ourselves can embark upon as we pass through the portals of death alone. Perhaps the greatest myth in our modern culture is the growth of sheer individualism with all that it entails. Modern individuals have built up around themselves their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a sense of identity - and all of that far too superficial or lacking in any depth.  Very soon we tire of superficiality, of building up  these rather tawdry worlds of vast egotistical proportions - rather like that portrayed in the novel, The Great Gatsby and most effectively indeed in the film of the same name.  All of these fantasies of individual power and prestige cannot keep the gnawing tooth of mortality at bay. Nor can any of these superficial attempts to build identity on the shifting sands of materialism keep the lonely soul protected from anxiety, angst and a host of concomitant emotional and psychosomatic complaints.

Some Personal Memories

The first death I can remember was that of my Grandmother Mary Phoebe Brophy in 1968 when I was ten years of age.  My young mind soaked in the experience as my mam and dad, as well all my uncles and aunts (all 11 of them) were very upset.  Perhaps the most consoling moment of the whole experience was being requested to kneel down and say a prayer at my grandmother's bedside and to touch her beaded hands.  I can still conjure up the vision of my grandmother's body in that bed all those years ago.  However, all in all, it was a positive experience, one that we were unconsciously taught to accept as a part of life, the final  mile stone along the journey of life if you like.  Then the second death I remember was that of my Uncle Paddy Quinlan at 58 of a rare cancer in 1970 - I remember so well the packed church and all the people who came to say goodbye on the day of his funeral.  I can still hear and feel the crunch of gravel under my shoes as I walked up to the graveside.  As I stood beside my father as they lowered the coffin, I saw a little white one and my father said gently, "that's your little angel brother Thomas who died many years ago." Since then, of course, there have been many other deaths, not the least of which were the deaths of my father and mother - experiences which I have recounted here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Those particular deaths were wrenches to my being that I find quite difficult to describe.  One knows that when one has experienced their leaving of this world that your generation is next.

Existentialism

Sundown, Phoenix Park, October 2014

The theme of anxiety was at the very heart of existentialism from its very origins. This is a sense of anguish which can be defined as a sense of dread at the nothingness of human existence. This theme goes back as far as Kierkegaard in modern existentialism though it stretched way back further into ancient philosophy, too. In fact, anxiety as a theme pervades this philosopher’s work. Kierkegaard lived his relatively short life (1813-1855) in Denmark. The meaninglessness of his existence filled him with anxiety and despair and a sense of hopelessness and deep depression. At base his anxiety was a deep despair at the very nothingness of human existence. In the great universal scheme of things we are mere minuscule ants on a minuscule anthill called earth, lost in the infinity of space. How do we cope with the fact that we as thinking and feeling subjects will come to nothing in the end? Let’s hear Kierkegaard’s words: “I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?”(Lavine, T.Z. (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest New York: Bantam Books)

Making Meaning

We are meaning-making creatures.  We are forever forming and moulding meaning from the very stuff of life.  If we do not do so we are an empty, hollow people whom T.S. Eliot describes so vividly in his poem The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken grass
In our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion ...

These people who are hollow are the superficial people we described in one of our opening paragraphs.  They are the ones who have built their identities on the shifting sands of their own private worlds of prestige, social achievement and material possessions - private worlds that give them a false sense of identity - and all of that, as I have said, far too superficial or lacking in any depth. Something in us is repulsed by lack of meaning and superficiality.  It's almost as if there is something in us - some divine spark - that wishes to ignite and set the fire of enthusiasm and joy alive in our our hearts.  We feel, indeed intuit or know at a deep level, that there is something somewhere drawing us on towards meaning, some amazing, if imaginary lodestone, drawing us ever onwards.  This spiritual spark in me demands that I call it God.  Perhaps, that is overstating my case.  And yet, those are the words that came out as I wrote these lines.  There is a fullness of life to be experienced if only we have the courage to reach out and embrace it.

And as a meaning-making species we have conjured religions up from our collective unconscious to guide us and lead us ever onward on our human journey to meaning and personal truth.  We have embraced spiritualities of various types to give us the courage and the sustenance to support us on our journey.  Whether such religions and spiritualities are actually the result of our own imagination matters not a whit.  Perhaps it comes from an outside power, namely God, and of this I am quite convinced some of the time, especially at moments when I experience all too transiently beauty, truth, love, wonder and mystery.  But yet, in another sense that matters not a whit either.  What matters is that we have a meaning, a reason to live and a reason to die.  In our faith, in our imagination or in our soul, our very meaning lives on, and that is what makes all the difference, a difference that no proselytizing atheist can ever take from us.  And death and dying in this scenario are surely as natural as birth and growth.  Yes, indeed. Amen to that!!

Journal of a Soul 41

Thoughts on the Eve of 2014

A very wet Lungomare, Soverato, Jan 2nd 2014

I remember once reading in the works of the great Victorian theologian, scholar and writer, John Henry Newman, that essentially how (not why) we believe was as much a mystery as how we remember.  And indeed, memory is one of those great mysteries in life.

As I write this post here in Isca Marina (Sullo Ionio) on the last day of the year of 2013, bereft of Internet connections as the rain pours down – almost as inexorably as it does in Ireland – I am indeed awash with memories, most of them random, though somewhere my inner Self (whatever or whoever that is) is giving them some structure and form. Being without any instant Internet connection for the week to come means that this post will not see “light of day” on-line until sometime later than this last day of 2013 - more than likely very early in The New Year.

Is memory (which here I am equating with what many of us have come to define as the Self) really all about nothing more than the random connections and interconnections made by all those millions upon millions of neurons through those even more numerous dendrites that randomly spark off one another through this or that neurotransmitter?  Or is the Self more than a biochemical or even a psychochemical mass?  Whatever, the Self may be it always has a sense of being so much more.  Indeed, every human being wants his or her Self to mean more, to be more, than just a “bundle of perceptions” as the great Scottish empiricist and atheist philosopher David Hume had it.  After all, what client or patient comes to a psychotherapist, counsellor, clinical psychologist or psychiatrist with the complaint that they don’t really feel that they are being true to their “real bundle of perceptions,” or that they have not yet found their “real bundle of perceptions”?  We believe deeply that we are more.  Intuitively we grasp that the whole (Self) is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than a mere “bundle of perceptions.”

And so for this present post I am defining myself as my memories.  At the end of any year we so love to trace what has happened not alone in the world or the country at large, but what the dying year has made of us.  Even, what all our years to date have made of us as we stand on the threshold of yet another year.

An old picture from 1945 or there abouts.  My mother is at the back on left

Memories crowd my neural memory pathways somewhat randomly, but with some little dictation from some centre of control – some area of “self-awareness.”  There I am, a three year old boy sitting on the dirt lane at the back of our house in Roscrea playing with a toy lorry and filling its trailer with lollypop bags of sand.  The old half-blind cat sits on the line pole, a great comforting presence.  The backyard is full of geranium plants.  The sting of the nettles on my legs as I run through the neighbouring fields. The fading sound of the train leaving Roscrea station with my daddy aboard, click, clack, click, clack, ...  Sad feelings.  Missing him again.  The move to Dublin. No electric light. Just candles till the power is restored.

My grandmother laid out in death in a bedroom in the old Crumlin house. I was ten. So still. Beyond us. Then and now. Only old faded photos remain. Uncle Pat’s funeral in 1970 when I am twelve.  The sound of leather shoes crushing the gravel as we followed the coffin up to its final resting place. The sound of clay falling on the wooden lid. Prayers intoned.  Men in gray coats condoling with my father. My mother comforting him in Granny Saunders’ garden when he cried. I buy ice cream for the same old woman – the oldest woman I have ever known as a young boy.  How I think she might expire at any second.  That horrible big yellow blister on her leg when she spilled boiling water on it. The time she told us that once as she dozed at the fire a mouse had run up here leg.  How we laughed.

The old Christian Brother who takes us for catechism and who tells us stories both to frighten and uplift us, though more of the former.  The smell of chalk dust mixed with stale urine, the steam that rises from wet coats as they lie draped over radiators on a rainy day.  The ice that covers the school yard making it a skating rink.  How we skate free on it before the bell tolls for class and lessons.  The young boy whose name I forget who is knocked clean from his bike to dusty death at only ten years of age.  The black hands of the old wind-up clock with Roman numerals that counts out our education in loud tick tocks.  The old brother winds it up every other day.

And there are so many other memories vying for attention with that self-aware centre of control that they could overpower, swamp and almost smother it at once, if all the controls were off.  Maybe this is the place to stop this wet last day of the dying year that is 2013.  Maybe too many memories have been summoned up.  Some centre of my inner Self has summoned them up, given them life, and shape and pattern.

Indeed how true is the opening statement I quoted from the venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman.  How we believe is as much as mystery as how we remember.  Perhaps a greater mystery is what we remember and how we choose to construct those memories, what shape and pattern, what form we may wish to give them.  That is the mystery of the Self, the centre of our identity which is an on-going construction, ever a work in progress.

Journal of a Soul 17

Memories

O'connell School, mid 1950s

A few minutes ago I was happily and nostalgically surfing a site for past pupils of my old alma mater - O'Connell School, North Richmond Street, Dublin, 1.  Old memories came flooding back when I was viewing some old pictures thereon.  As I sit here typing these thoughts, I am caught in a web of nostalgia, literally being "brought home" ("nostos") or back to a place that contains many happy memories for me. The second Greek word from which the compound "nostalgia" derives its origin is "algos" which means pain or ache.   And when we remember this or that person, this or that event, long since past, we are both happy and sad at one and the same time, hence the sense of ache or pain. 

I recall many years ago my Uncle John Saunders from San Francisco and my father Tom sitting at the kitchen table way back in the early 1970s polishing off a bottle of good Irish whiskey and their both weeping into their drinks with nostalgia for the old days when they were boys growing up in Roscrea, County Tipperary.  We all have such moments, because memory makes us who and what we are.  Without our memories, who or what are we at all?  That is why Alzheimer's and Dementia are such curses to humankind as they begin to wipe away our memories bit by bit.  Another way of putting this is that these dreadful diseases begin to wipe out inexorably the personality or true identity of the individual.

In fact, we could argue that memory makes us who we are.  It gives us our hold on life; defines us; identifies us; gives us a strong sense of our selfhood and roots us in a certain place, in a certain country, with certain people and particular events and so on.  We mull over ideas in the present with our short-term or working memory - all the things we are able to do and keep in our mind to perform our everyday functioning. However, we store past events and learned meanings in our long-term or episodic (or semantic) memory.  Moreover, the psychologists inform us that memory is malleable - and it tends to decay with age. Indeed, often our imaginations add in little extra details and colourings that were not part of the original remembered event or happening.

I have just resumed this post some twelve hours after I last wrote the preceding paragraphs.  At this juncture, I have just returned from visiting my 96 year old severely demented mother.  In fact she is physically quite good, but her memory has been almost wiped 100% clean, except for a few random words and a lot of garbled sounds of words and non-words crashing into one another.  And yet she smiles and seems happy.  In fact she ate two small yogurts for me and drank a half glass of orange juice. Other than that, I sat by her side reading my latest copy of Philosophy Now.

The nineteenth century theologian and Catholic apologist, John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) used say that how we believe is a s much a s mystery as how we remember.  Cognitive scientists would most likely say that our memories are sparked off by some image or word or feeling we associate with something or someone we encounter, and that the whole thing is as simple as cause and effect or stimulus and response.  And yet it is more.  I am very much a Gestaltian in tendency and see things in wholes and patterns and overall shapes.  For me, and I am sure that for most of you reading this blog entry, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.  Whatever moves us is deeply rooted in who we are, in our identity as a person, in our very self or soul.  We simply believe (perhaps just like to believe) that we are more than a random collocation of atoms, or organs or whatever.

O'Connell School today

And life, what is it at all?  Just a small question that never ceases to cause us to ponder deeply on our human condition.  As I type these few words I remember back to 1980, some 33 years ago.  My memory carries me back to the staffroom in O'Connell School where I had just become a teacher.  I was teaching Religious Education and Mathematics at the time, though my timetable was made up of most of the former.  One winter's morning I arrived in somewhat early and found Gerard Smith sitting beside the electric fire.  He greeted me and asked me "What is it all about at all, at all?"  I replied that this was a very heavy question to be asking me at that hour of the morning.  I deliberately did not answer him, as I simply couldn't. However, I knew that that question had come from the depths of Gerard's being.  To make a long story short, Gerard, unknown to any of us his colleagues, had a congenital heart disease from which he was to die sadly some years later.  Another one of his great friends on the staff, Gerard Donnelly, who joined us in 1982 as a Science and Maths teacher died all too young two years ago from cancer at the young age of fifty. I remember this second colleague of mine being very upset at the other man's demise.  And so these memories come.  They are not random memories but extremely focused ones.

We are left with the mystery of who we are, of what the whole point about life really is, of how does it add up at all.  Then there is that wonderful question which runs: Why is there something rather than nothing?  What is nothing?  Can nothing exist?  What does it mean to be conscious anyway - what is consciousness?  If a tree falls in the wood and there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound? What is knowledge?  How should we act towards others?  What is right and wrong? Why is there Evil in the world?  Why do we die?  Why do we suffer?  Why do we live at all in the first place?  Why do we exist? and so on and so forth.  There are, of course, philosophers who declare such questions meaningless as they see such questions as essentially ones based on bad logic and very poor reason.  Such metaphysical questions are beyond the scope of their type of philosophy.  And yet, we experience ourselves as persons who search for patterns and meanings, who are enthralled by the mystery and wonder of the universe of which we are such a minuscule part.  We can rightly wonder at our small role in that one great mystery.  After all, philosophy, and all good art and all good science, begin exactly there - in wonder!!

And so whether I am weeping nostalgically into a shared drink with another human being, perusing a past pupil website of my Alma Mater, discussing a crisis or problem with a friend or spouse, writing a poem, singing a song, remembering my school days, visiting the graves of relatives and friends, reading a good novel or poem, viewing old photographs, reading old letters, visiting old haunts, I am doing things that essentially make me human, that confirm me in my identity as of such and such a family, as coming from this or that town or county or country or continent, as being really the stuff "on which dreams are made" as Shakespeare so sublimely puts it.

It's time to go an have a nightcap - a nice glass of Irish whiskey - A Jameson preferably.  Good night and sleep well.

Journal of a Soul 8

Badolato Marina Beach, June 2012

The fleeting nature of time has long been a topic in philosophy.  Things are so much in flux that the ancient pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus declared so insightfully that we cannot step into the same river twice.  Our grand-parents, now long since passed away, used to opine, also rather wisely, “that much water has passed under the bridge” since X, Y or Z happened.  They intuitively had grasped exactly what Heraclitus meant.

As a small boy I used hate travelling with my parents to my father’s home town, called Roscrea, in the County of Tipperary in the Southern midlands of Ireland.  He would inevitably end up in this or that erstwhile neighbour’s house or in this or that local hostelry reminiscing on his youth, on how quickly the years had passed, on where A or B had lived, on whether C or D were still in England or America and how sad it was that E and F were now no more. It used to drive us children mad as we just wanted to be outside playing.  We simply did not wish to be sitting indoors while the older people went back in time in their minds.  And yet we were often bemused that my father could remember decades before the then present time.

As I age it has now become quite interesting that I can now appreciate what made my father misty eyed as he reminisced about the so-called “good old days” which were not that good at all at all.  At 54 years of age I can recall clearly when I was three years old playing with a toy lorry in the lane at the back of our house in Roscrea.  Now that’s 51 years ago or just slightly over five decades in the past.  That time has passed so quickly is at once frightening and somewhat consoling too.  If everything were to stay the same there simply would be no being or becoming at all, no ageing and consequently no death.  Indeed, if everything were to remain the same would there even be birth?  Without change there would be no life at all.  Then, paradoxically, one could say that without death there would be no life at all. 

To be is to become; to become is to grow old; to grow old is to die.  St Augustine once defined time as “the measure of change.”  For a fourth century intellectual that was not a bad definition of time at all.  To grow is to change.  To live is to grow and change, and indeed, eventually to die.

Modernity has a lot going for it.  Health of humans and indeed animals has improved remarkably in the last, say, one hundred years.  People are now living longer; women into their late eighties and men into their late seventies and early eighties.  I’m taking these figures from my own experience here in Ireland, and have not checked them out, but they are roughly accurate.  Modernity has brought comfort with it also, with so many pieces of modern technology to help us in our every daily task.  And so living has become less of a struggle.  We are also so much better educated.  Added to that, we can practically travel anywhere we want in the modern world, again with greater ease and with so much less cost than one hundred years ago.  Within reason we have more control over our lives than our forefathers.  And yet, this control over our lives has a downside to it.

Modernity, and indeed post-modernity if that is the way to describe our time in the early 21^st century, have hoodwinked us into believing almost the impossible at times.  We, in the Northern hemisphere certainly, believe that we are entitled to all the benefits that a modern state can give; believe almost at times that the world (or State) owes us a living; believe that we can conquer the impossible; live longer and ever longer; look to our selfish rights without adequately considering our due responsibilities.  And this is where we have lost some of the extraordinary advantages of less modern times.

Another view of Badolato Beach

Those advantages were more of a “soul-making nature.”  John Keats, the great poet of the English Romantic period, who lived to be barely 25 years of age used to call this world the “vale of soul-making.”  The poor man died very young from Tuberculosis.  Even travelling to the wonderfully warm climes of Rome failed to stop the inevitable.  In other words, from our sufferings we can learn.  Now, here I am not necessarily talking about suffering and dying per se, or about learning their profound if bitter lessons.  No, I am referring to the fact that we can learn to slow down; learn to take stock of life; learn to prioritize things in our lives; learn to listen to our own Heart or Soul; learn to listen to the Heart or Soul of an Other; learn to be in tune with the rhythms of life; learn really to be at one with the natural sequences of the seasons.

And so to finish this post, I have learned to slow down firstly the hard way by enduring a bad mental breakdown occasioned by too much stress when I was forty.  But I knew that I had to do more.  I then began to do many creative soul-making things like Meditation, taking more time out, learning to say NO, learning to do new things, to holiday more, to write more, to reflect more, to go to more personal development conferences, to get to know positive people and to spend more time with such people, to cultivate friendships because truly relationships are like plants, they will wither and die if not cared for.  Even in the concrete jungles of modern cities each of us can at least cultivate a small garden on our balconies.  I have seen many of them in the biggest and most alienating of cities.  I have also been privileged to have been welcomed into the smallest and most homely and soul-full of homes in the biggest of cities.  In other words, with practice we can learn to grow our own Souls with care.  We can also learn in the most alien of places to put down roots of Self.  By doing so we will become attuned once again, like our forebears to the rhythms and cycles of the seasons where it is just as natural for the ripe fruit to drop from the bough as it is just as natural for the seed to die and give forth the life of a new young shoot.  Being in tune with the rhythms and cycles of the seasons, with the circular nature of time, readies us to face our own necessary part in those same cycles and rhythms, of which our dying and death are just such a little part.