The richest life

On a trip to Alberta to see my family last week, I read Never Let Me Go, another literary treasure by Kazuo Ishiguro, also author of the extraordinary Remains of the Day.

As with Remains of the Day, Ishiguro gently introduces his reader to atrocity — the way atrocity can be understood, as the product of the best intentions of flawed human beings. (And aren’t we all flawed humans — well-intentioned — and perhaps, therefore, capable of atrocity?)

We are drawn into the world of a boarding school, as remembered by Kathy H., one of the students, with more fondness than seems warranted. Along the way we learn that Kathy and her fellow students are clones, produced for the purpose of providing organs to non-cloned humans, once they’ve grown to adulthood. The social scientists behind the clone/donor program have developed an ingenious education process that instills the rightness and inevitability of donorship in these sweetly presented youth, and the book ends with a kind of honeyed horror.

The characters accompanied me as I traveled the 1,000 or so miles from my father’s ranch to my home here by the ocean. Only today did the deeper resonance of the story make itself clear to me, as I read an article in the New York Times about payday loan companies, and the families that ruin themselves by taking small ($150 or $200) loans and paying fees and interest equivalent to more than 500% per year.

It occurred to me this afternoon that while Ishiguro may have intended his moral to be about the potential abuse of modern health science, our deeply indebted, consumption-addled society is also parallel to the one he’s created. While we don’t donate our organs, we give up something equally precious to the quality of our lives, our time.

We are ingeniously educated to believe that our worth can be measured in purchases, and are given the means to indenture ourselves through loans and credit cards. We then sell our time in an attempt to keep up — in essence, donating our lives for the profitability of financial institutions and the more superior humans who own them.

I know there is a positive moral in here somewhere — I could say something about how choosing a simpler life can quickly free us, or how we must encourage our leaders to stop financial cannibalism. But frankly, my heart is aching, and that motivational message will have to wait for another day.

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known
defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found
their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a
sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with
compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do
not just happen.”

Elizabeth Kubler Ross, 1926-2004
Swiss-born Author and Psychiatrist

From Inspiration Peak

This evening on my walk I met a young man picking berries. He was joyful. “Blackberry season!” he said, holding up a half-full jug of his treasure. “That’s quite a haul,” I said, wanting to connect, but feeling a bit confused and tongue-tied at his enthusiastic presence on my normally silent route. “I have another full pitcher in my backpack. I’m going to make pies, or wine — I can’t decide.” “Delicious!” I said, still struggling for my language.

As I walk, I aim for these moment, these ’sacred connections.’

I am not all that good at relationships, frankly — I’m sensitive, a bit self-absorbed, full of a passion for ideas that sometimes overwhelms my sensitivity to people’s attachment to their own. I love my own company, and the peace and safety of it. I never hurt my own feelings or misunderstand anything I say, and I have to admit that I’m a bit lazy — I like to retreat into the comfortable company of me.

That said, people delight me in small doses. So while I am not a particularly social person (having turned down two party invitations to sit at home and be with myself tonight, for example) I am awed and made ecstatic by brief connections.

That boy, for example — I hope that he takes with him the memory or even the idea that a middle-aged woman was interested in him, and admiring of his accomplishments. I love the little boy I saw later in his stroller, pushed up a steep hill by his loving father, who burst into ‘Hello!’ and a beaming smile when he saw me, a stranger.

There has been an awareness in me lately that those brief moments between strangers, and those who are not strange to us but who we do not yet think of as friends, are sacred — precious in a way that we cannot fully comprehend.

As I participate in them, I try to bring myself fully — rested, calm, relaxed from my yoga, meditation and sleep practices — to bring what I can. A few words of extra, unexpected greeting, “How are you?” without an expectation of return. (For I know from experience how surprise can tie the tongue.)

I wonder — how much of the whole of life, the sum of all experience of all sentient beings on this beautiful planet of ours — is elevated or diminished by the consciousness we bring to these sacred intersections?

A few weeks ago, a very successful person in my community told me that he works 120 hours a week. I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since.

We were talking about prosperity, and the fact that an organization we’re both interested in is facing an income/expense challenge. (That is, its expenses are greater than its income.) For him, the problem was simple: not enough prosperity, as defined by “not enough BMWs in the parking lot.”

Again, that phrase has haunted me, in part because a car for me is a means of getting from one place to another with as little expense, environmental damage and trouble as possible. When I see an expensive car, I always think, “What they could have DONE with that money!” I think of wells in African villages and after-school programs in inner cities.

More importantly, working 120 hours in a week seems the most abject form of slavery to me. I stop to figure out if it’s even possible — yes, that’s more than 17 hours a day, seven days per week. What about sleep — glorious, restorative, dream-filled, health-building, mind-clearing, mood-lifting sleep? Or the only thing that really makes us happy, the company of people we care about? What about all the great books there are to read and the delightful movies there are to see? What about long walks among trees and singing birds? What about life?

I’ve come to the conclusion that we have very different definitions of prosperity, he and I. He has a lot of money and property and is highly regarded by many people who admire money and property. I have the freedom to sleep in each morning, work where I want to, and carve out hours in the day to walk, do yoga and spend time with the people I love.

We are both prosperous, and yet we think of each other as impoverished.

I wonder how many other people that’s true of?