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I had a minor breakdown on Sunday due to a confluence of factors, including but not limited to the following:
This post is not about that. It's about something that happened after that.
As it was winding down and I was calmer, R said something that her phone apparently heard as an "Okay Google" request followed by a Bible verse, Psalm 37:3-7:
3. Trust in the LORD and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
4. Take delight in the LORD,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
5. Commit your way to the LORD;
trust in him and he will do this:
6. He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn,
your vindication like the noonday sun.
7. Be still before the LORD
and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when people succeed in their ways,
when they carry out their wicked schemes.
~ New International Version
I got a strong whiff, reading these, of some of the reading I've been doing on the *I Ching*: the gist is, you wait for when the time is right to act, then act decisively. I'm the opposite of religious, but I do think things happen, and sometimes they line up. (That's not exactly what Jung meant by *synchronicity*, but it's close enough for me.) I grew up in the Methodist church, so I often think of the God I don't believe in -- it's a convenient shorthand for me to think of that mystery of the universe, the things we can't know simply because they're hidden, or on a different wavelength than we can see, and the way everything is interconnected.
So when I read *LORD* in this Psalm, I think of things that happen -- I want to capitalize Things that Happen but honestly, they don't want that. They don't want anything. They're just events. But for us to be happy for ourselves, we need to take those things and string them together into some larger narrative, or story, or quilt, or whatever. That's how we make that meaning, right? By taking disparate events and finding the threads between them. At least, philosophical meaning -- which is possibly the least important kind of meaning?
Honestly, writing this out is so frustrating sometimes. When all this happened, when I was crying and then calmed down and suddenly, a computer voice from R's phone rang out and we saw the lines above and read them to each other -- there was a clarity, a luminosity, that cannot be explained. Part of it, I'm sure, is the flood of chemicals I was experiencing at the time; part of it was that fundamental "you had to be there"-edness of human experience. We write, not to transport each other to our past selves, but to try and draw a picture of what it was like for us, before. We write to explain, and sometimes we do. But it necessarily loses some of the luminosity of the moment, because we are no longer in the moment when writing it, and also the moment is three, or even four-dimensional, and prose is one-dimensional: you can only read the words one at a time, in order, down the page.
But I digress. I'm talking about synchronicity here. I don't believe in God or any kind of organizing principle, but things happen. Sometimes there are harmonies even in din.
Plus, once you start looking (I think of my mother telling me about Annie Dillard, of her experience with praying mantis egg cases), you tend to find things. R sent me two quotes this morning, which prompted this post:
Maybe the journey isn't much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about unbecoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.
~ @rainavsfood@instagram
Work is doing it. Discipline is doing it every day. Diligence is doing it well every day.
~ Dave Ramsay @ twitter
One last thing, before I go: these quotes are from Instagram and Twitter, respectively, and I think it's easy to discount sources like those as frivolous or whatever. Ditto for those Bible verses up there -- maybe that's why I've spent so much time defining my relationship to the Bible in this post. But the thing that always bothered me about being at Church, in fact one of the reasons I left it, was the fallacious argument that Jesus could either be right or be crazy, and since we wasn't crazy, he must've been right in saying he was the Son of God. It just doesn't follow -- you could think you're God but still make good points. Anyway, I bring that up because it's the same for everything. Wisdom can come from anywhere. Just because it's a tweet or a little photo with presumptuous fonts on it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Maybe there's a lower signal-to-noise ratio on those kinds of sites. Definitely there's a lower ratio. But there's still a signal.