FIFTEEN

In Conclusion

Here is a passage by Abraham Joshua Heschel from A Passion for Truth:

All worlds are in need of exaltation, and everyone is charged to lift what is low, to unite what lies apart, to advance what is left behind.… All facts are parables; their object is God. All things are tales the Teacher relates in order to render intelligible issues too difficult to comprehend literally, directly. Through things seen, God accommodates Himself to our level of understanding. What a shame it is that people do not comprehend the greatness of things on earth. They act as if life were trivial, not realizing that every trifle is filled with Divinity. No one makes a move that does not stir the highest Heaven.

When a young woman who was my assistant for a brief period came to tell me that she was leaving to go to work for a new magazine, she explained, “You need someone good at detail, which I’m not.”

I explained to her gently that there are only details. There isn’t anything else. If you step onto a bridge and don’t look where you are going, you may lose your footing and plunge into the water. I had earlier tried to get her to understand that it is better to pay attention and get something right to begin with than to make a small mistake and expend a great deal of time and energy correcting it. Mistakes proliferate at an alarming rate. In that last conversation I encouraged her to understand the nature of details not for my sake but for her own. Not paying attention to a detail might one day cost her her life.

It made me a little sad that during the five months she worked for me, she had not learned one of the most important things I had to teach her—scrupulous attention to everything. I have this down to such a fine art that it sometimes backfires! Publishing books is all about detail, and those who work with me sometimes assume that I have checked everything carefully, and therefore (I suspect) they don’t double-check what I hand over to them the way they do for other people. They just assume that I have probably caught any mistakes. I am as fallible as everyone else, which is why I feel the need to be so careful. I am never sure that I have caught everything.

Because even the smallest detail is vital, I find it important to keep in mind the four laws of ecology that Barry Commoner shared with the world in his book The Closing Circle. They are as useful to me now as they were when I first encountered them in 1971:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.

2. Everything must go somewhere.

3. Nature knows best.

4. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

One of the remarkable aspects of these principles is that they are all saying the same thing, and so it doesn’t really matter at which end you start.

Everything that you think or do or say is connected not only to everything else in your life, but also to everything in everybody else’s life. You cannot do something in isolation, something that does not have an effect on the world at large.

Not only is everything connected to everything else, but each person is also connected to everyone else. We are all joined at the hip, so to speak. Looked at in this way, it becomes evident that there is only one of us. Buddhists explain this by saying that each of us is like a different part of the same body and we tend to strut about, believing that we have a life of our own, although, in truth, we may be just a cell or an eyelash.

The corollary to all this is that not only does what you or I do affect the whole world, but what everyone else in the world does affects us also. This is why it is impossible (at least for us) to trace karma back to its roots. There are strands of it coming from every conceivable direction.

It follows that if someone takes you out for a meal, sends you an armful of tulips, or pays you a compliment, it comes with a price. The price is not necessarily visible on a tag, but it is definitely there. The donor may believe that he or she is giving you something freely, but that may not be the way you receive the gift—or vice versa. There are subtle strings joining everything in creation. I don’t mean that you will necessarily “pay back” the same person. The response you have to what you received may take any number of forms. For instance, “random acts of kindness” are not nearly as random as people believe. I heard a story about someone paying the toll for the car behind without knowing who was driving that car. The person who paid the toll did so because of something that had happened to her. And the driver who was on the receiving end undoubtedly passed on the goodwill to someone else in one form or another. As I said, it doesn’t have to be a direct quid pro quo.

This is all part of the law of karma. Many people believe that karma is linear: If you do some terrible (or wonderful) thing, you will receive your just desserts. However, the way it seems to be set up is not as personal as that. You have a thought or take some action, and there is a result. The consequences will be experienced, but not necessarily by you, and nobody knows when.

Around the same time that I discovered Barry Commoner, I started delving into the work of Alan Watts. The first book I read was The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, and there is one story he tells in it that is relevant here. He describes a high fence with just a chink in it through which you can peer in order to see what is going on on the other side. If you put your eye close to the chink, you sometimes get a glimpse of whiskers, then a nose, two ears, a body with two legs, two more legs, and finally a tail. Sometime later you may see this sequence in reverse order, and you may very well deduce from your observations that whiskers are always followed by a tail. However, if you looked over the fence, you would see at once that it was all part of the same cat.

It becomes apparent that what may look like a thought, a word, or an action, and its eventual consequences is, in reality, all part of the same cat.

 

This started out as a book on how to live a simple life. What I discovered as I examined the nature of simplicity is that it all depends on integrity and impeccability. If you focus on these two qualities, your life simplifies itself.

The scraps of wisdom I offer here—my gleanings—have been gathered over many years. Each grain lingered dormant in a crevice of my mind until now. Perhaps you will connect with one of these seeds and store it away for another decade before you, too, actually water it with your attention and it starts to sprout.

The book is a sharing of all that I have received of value. I have tried to record faithfully whatever I thought would be useful to others. I didn’t want to have anything left over! I cannot claim that any of it is original, but I hope that some of it may be new to you. As I was nearing the end and scouring my mind for any overlooked seeds, a friend in London sent me the following poem that was written by an American over a hundred years ago. He must have been a very frugal fellow because he set down on one sheet of paper what it has taken me a whole book to say:

To live content with small means,
to seek elegance rather than luxury
and refinement rather than fashion,
to be worthy, not respectable,
and wealthy, not rich,
to study hard, think quietly,
talk gently, act frankly,
to listen to stars and birds,
babes and sages, with open heart,
to hear all cheerfully,
do all bravely,
await occasions,
hurry never—
in a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.

William Henry Channing (I8I0-I884)