Slip Slidin' Away?

When I first heard this song, on its release, I thought it melancholy, even gloomy. It seemed to say to me that life is slipping away from us even when we think we are being purposeful; it seemed a bit hopeless.

It seems to me now to be liberating and enlightened. Maybe the more we try to be purposeful and control everything in our lives, the more it slip slides away from us. And in any case, life itself moves through us until it ends, whatever we do. Understanding this rather better these days helps me to value now, here. I think it's one component of mindfulness. It actually stops me worrying so much about the brevity of life.

When I first heard this song, I enjoyed popular music well enough. I don't think I ever derided music because it is categorised as "easy listening," or "middle of the road." Listen with your ears, not your file index, someone once said to me. But I didn't expect to find anything very profound in it; intensity of youthful feeling, yes; a sound-track for our life and times, sure.

It seems to me now a total masterpiece, full of wisdom and acceptance, rooted in the fabric of our 20th/21st century lives yet not swamped by it, not merely echoing it. It's even better, I think, than "Trains in the Distance." In my mind, it  sits with Karine Polwart's "We're All Leaving" as a song of profound acceptance and understanding. And this  performance, I hope you'll agree, is absolutely beautiful - flawless. I won't put up the words, they are so clear.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Trouble In Mind - Humph

I think we can reasonably expect people at a funeral to be troubled in mind, to feel blue, even if there's also the "celebration of a life" going on, as no doubt there was at Humph's funeral, after his long, creative and productive life, which brought so much pleasure to so many people.

This track has a stately melancholy which I think would be perfect for processing into a funeral.

Revivalist, later to mutate into "trad," jazz doesn't get much attention nowadays. It probably seems quaint, remote, sometimes over-excited, to many people. British jazz suffered then, perhaps a little less now, from an inferiority complex compared with jazz in its country of birth, which of course is understandable. No need for such feelings here. Just listen to Humph's musical, perfectly judged improvisation on the last couple of choruses, behind the beautiful shrilling of the clarinets.

The effect of such music, if it works for you, is to take you through the blues to somewhere calmer. Which is what a successful funeral should do.

Take it home, Humph - and: thanks.

Time and NOW

OK, so we aren't all lucky enough to be able to put our feet up on a lakeside veranda whilst we stay with "the bloom of the present moment;" but we can all help ourselves by developing techniques for doing so, wherever we are.

In a comment on my last posting, the one about Henry David Thoreau, Charles, and thanks to him for so many lively responses to my meanderings,  asked how one empties the mind so as to escape from the usual sense of onward time. My entirely predictable answer was "mindfulness meditation," and it probably always will be my answer to such questions.

A moment's reflection on time is likely to yield puzzling paradoxes. It can be elastic - "marvellous how time flies when you're having fun," or "as the catastrophe approached, time went into slow motion." No matter how astonishingly accurate our timepieces may be, they only measure a net - clock time - which we throw over the universe to make sense of it.

Einstein (I'm getting nervous here...) showed that time and space are relative to each other (I think - didn't he?) and that if you travel away from home at light-speed, when you get back you'll have aged at a completely different rate from those you left behind. i.e. they'll be dead, and you'll still be young (though possible also dead from trying to travel that fast. I digress, sorry.)

So - how can time be an absolute? And even if it were, our perception of it, the way we actually live in it, is very relative.

Then there's the paradox of the present. It's all that exists, it contains the past and the future - memories of times gone by are events in the present - yet how long IS the present moment?

This stuff makes my head swim - which is good, because it encourages me to step outside of sequential event-type time, allow the train of thoughts about past and future to subside, and spend a little time in the NOW.

I've come across a website, "Wildmind," which could be a very useful resource for anyone in search of the general benefits of spending at least part of each day entirely in the present moment. It has some Buddhist names, terminology and concepts - which is OK by me, because that's where the mindfulness meditation thing comes from, but might put some people off. I hope not, because in any case, some of the articles to be found in it are entirely free of such specialist background. Here are links to a couple of articles about meditation, the present moment, and the strange reality of NOW.

http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/when-are-you

http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/stepping-into-timelessness

Finally for this post: TS Eliot may have looked and sounded like a slightly prissy bank manager of the old school, but his insights into meditation and into time itself seem to me profound and valuable. This bit of the "Four Quartets" is pretty well-known, but if you stop and let it sink in...

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

Time is unredeemable, so only the present truly exists, vanishing as soon as it arrives....

The bloom of the present moment

With thanks to Vale, over on the Good Funeral Guide, 

http://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/2012/05/moose-indian/


for reminding me of something crucial about Henry David Thoreau. 


Here's something he wrote in "Walden:"


"I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. 


I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. 


I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. "


Or indeed, what we mean by mindfulness meditation.


"The bloom of the present moment." "I grew in those seasons like the corn in the night."


It's all there.

Longevity, no left turns, and a wonderful way to go.

I've no way of referencing this or vouching for it - it was sent to me by an old friend - but I didn't want you to miss it. I think it's long, but worth it, and I hope you agree. I also hope you agree that it doesn't really need any pictures.

What a wonderful couple, what a wonderful way to go.

(NB - when it comes to left and right turns, remember that Americans persist in their odd habit of driving on the wrong side of the road.)

"This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of
newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997,
he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet. "In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things withyour feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull shit!" she said. "He hit a horse."

"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car.

The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941Dodge, the Van Laninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbours had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one." It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.

It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea.

"Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying more than once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.

(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.

If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored."

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"

"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

"No left turns," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."

"What?" I said again.

"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."

"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support. "No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works."

But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.

"Loses count?" I asked.

"Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."

I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.

"No," he said " If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week."

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving.

That was in 1999, when she was 90.

She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.

They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred."

At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer."

"You're probably right," I said.

"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated.

"Because you're 102 years old," I said..

"Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.

He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet"

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have."

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life, or because he quit taking left turns. "

I think it is because he was like an ancient Buddhist sage, mindful and at peace with himself.

Nurse Sharon

I'd like you to meet Sharon. She's just been given a prime position in my gallery of heroes.

The wonderful IanMiller's impactEDnurse blog is running a book of nurses. Here's an excerpt from the latest, by Sharon (who's in the UK) I thought it might be too enlightening and touching for you to miss.

"Tell us a story: an amazing, funny, moving or memorable moment from your book of shifts. –

I was working in a hospice, pregnant with my second child and looking after a woman who was dying. She was the same age as I was (29 at the time) with two small boys. She was moribund, unconscious, expected to die within hours. I was fiddling about by the side of her bed when I felt a tap on my shoulder, I looked round and she was struggling to sit up, then said “I`m bloody starving, can you get me something to eat and then call my family, I want to talk to them one last time.” We all ran around like mad women getting her family together, not having time to wonder how she had just ….woken up.
Her family arrived, she spoke to them for 10 mins, called me over, said “Thanks Sharon” laid down and died.

I still feel so privileged to have been part of that. I don’t have any religious conviction and my spiritual side is still sadly lacking, but there was something “else” going on that day apart from disease and drugs, I think it was love. That one event opened my mind to accept that sometimes medicine just doesn’t have all the answers….."

Your cursor will take you to the impacetEDnurse's blog where you can read all of Sharon's post. She thinks she's a grumpy old woman. Hunh. Nonsense. As our government sets about, yet again, "reforming" the NHS, we need to tell all Sharons loud and often that they are bloody marvellous and we love them dearly. As it says on Ian's blog, "not just a nurse."

It's come to my attention that some of you are not checking Ian Miller's blog. It's sharp, thought-provoking, stylishly designed and it's not all about sutures and canella. (Whatever they are.) The bits that are about pressure, human relationships and meditative calm amidst chaos are gold. I suggest, even urge you, if you are interested in a very modern kind of profundity, to get on over there. Your cursor over my title will lead you thither.

Freedom and risk on the Wall of Death

No flashy video, it doesn't need one, and this is the original recording with his then-wife Linda. There's also a good performance on YouTube video by RT and Christine Collister.

You may know of Thompson the teenage prodigy, Thompson one of the very few truly great and inimitable guitarists, Thompson the powerfully original songwriter. Did you know he is also a true thinker about mortality? In this song he captures an essential, simple truth: life is a risk, we live with death, and the only true freedom is to be found, not on the other rides, but on the Wall of Death. I respectfully suggest you play this loud.

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

You can go with the crazy people in the Crooked House
You can fly away on the Rocket or spin in the Mouse
The Tunnel Of Love might amuse you
Noah's Ark might confuse you
But let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

On the Wall Of Death all the world is far from me
On the Wall Of Death it's the nearest to being free

Well you're going nowhere when you ride on the carousel
And maybe you're strong but what's the good of ringing a bell
The switchback will make you crazy. Beware of the bearded lady
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death

Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Oh let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death