Those Little Cat Feet

Six weeks ago I started this, the first of my blogs on blogspot. Like Shiva, I had been creating and destroying blogs for years. Before that, going back to the 1970s when I still lived in the Philippines, I wrote journals in steno notebooks that I still have. (Amazing! 30 years of this!) Blogger was the first time I wrote on a publicly searchable format, an advance that mirrors many of the other endeavors that I have now undertaken.

This blog started when I became disheartened with using iWeb because Apple had trouble creating its new web-hosting service. That launched my move to searching for another way to post my photo images on the Internet and led me to duendearts.smugmug.com. Smugmug.com is a better venue than anything I knew of before moving through the fog on little cat feet!

The Pursuit of Duende is the record of my search for excellence in my life, not just in terms of photographs and what art there is in what I do, but in how I live life itself. Today's post is a point-in-time summation. How does my life, maybe life for everyone, unfold? Wherefore comes its happy accidents and creative moments? 

I said it: accidents.  What turns out is a mix of what we determine to pursue and what comes our way as unpredictable circumstance. So much is made of human will and intentionality, be this in Judeo-Christian, Muslim or Buddhist framework of belief. Certainly what we will shapes much of what happens in our lives. Will gives "shape" to what happens but most of the details in that shape arises from somewhere else, what most civilized people in the world today call God.

As I look back from the vantage of someone who has been analyzing the events of his own life the past 9 months, I see the interplay of these two forces, will and circumstance. Often I decide to do something because of a feeling that I don't even acknowledge to myself. I justify the decisions by cloaking them in the raiment of reason or some other more elevated bias. Regardless of the inciting motive, the result more often than not leads me somewhere both strange and exciting, leads me where I realize I do want to be just didn't know about it before I got here!

I decided on taking a year-long sabbatical in April after trying out three months of it and finding on my return to clinic work that I didn't want to be there. This process actually started a year ago when I started planning to take time off from clinical work. I took a short break from clinical work earlier in 2007 to attend NAB. That first break taught me a break was doable. The December break was not productive of the results I thought I wanted to accomplish. This was because in truth I was acting on a motive that had been lurking in back of my mind since the late 1960s!

As the fourth month of my third break comes to an end, I find myself at a place almost wholly different from where I imagined I would be last December. For years I dreamt of "retiring" from clinical practice but just didn't think I had the financial resources to do it. "Retiring" is a different animal to me now than it has ever looked like in the past. It is not only doable but may even already be here!

Retiring is no longer the retreat I felt it was. It is more like a surge into a future that I had missed creating my previous years. A friend, appropriately called Castor, recently wrote me that he admired me because I was doing what I wanted to do in life. Someone outside my mind sometimes reads it better than I. Retiring is doing what I want to do and having somehow the resources to do this amazes beyond belief.

What I am doing now is not only a shift in activities but in patterns of doing. Years ago when I came across stories of the Chinese gentlemen hermits who opt out of society to live alone in inaccessible places where their lives became simple because they eliminated responsibilities and constraints that they determined were spinning-the-wheel useless the idea was born to live a contemplative life that included only what was bare-bones necessary and desirable. How many people can say they have done this? For most it is not what they want. Commerce with the world at large so obfuscates the issues. The "world" is too seductive.

In the Samyutta Nikaya, Mara, the Buddhist personification of Evil, addresses the Buddha: " To me belong the eye, all bodily forms, the field of vision... To me belong the ear, the sounds, the field of audition.. To me belong the nose... the tongue... the body... the mind, the conditions of mind, the field of mind cognition."

Mara actually is the ancient Indian god of death but he also represents our lust for life, the power of transitory things that somehow we unenlightened humans slavishly pursue. But like the solar year, our lives too have seasons. The Hindu system described this perhaps better than any other. We move from being students of life to being householders (pursuing a livelihood, raising a family) to pursuing wisdom and finally to slowing down to the cadences of nature and timelessness.

A man's life feels long at times but when summarized is such a short span of time. Mind occupies no space hence gives the sense of timelessness. We journey in a split second from childhood to our imagined death.

In his saga, Ultimate Journey, Richard Bernstein, New York Times book reviewer, wrote: "Most of us middle-aged men are among that species of routinized, rationalized beings that Max Weber called 'specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.' We start out idealists and we end up creatures of habit, more concerned about the state of the lawn than of the spirit. Yes, we say to ourselves, it would be nice to break away for a while, but who would walk the dog?" Truer words I have not read.