“In an insecure world, pleasure is uncertain.”
The Wisdom of Insecurity is the kind
of book, truthfully, that made me long to be back in a classroom, that
made me miss being a student again, for there is so much here to ponder
and debate. Repeatedly I asked myself if this was really written in
1951, so in sync are the ideas with today's world. If Alan Watts felt,
in 1951, that the "miracles of technology....enabl[e] us to do nothing
but pursue the future faster and faster" what would he think today?
After all, the planets are still circling the sun, and the question of
"Are they getting anywhere, and do they go faster and faster in order to
arrive?" has the same answer now as it did 70 years ago.
Beyond thinking about the scope of conversation it would engender,
it also really resonated with me in the sense that Alan Watts put into
words so much of what makes me tick, starting with a deep-seated
agnosticism....I mean, I couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9 when I got
in trouble in Sunday school for pressing the teacher on how anyone could
possibly *know* there was a god.....and think I’ve been spiritual
rather than religious since then. When I read the bit about “If you ask
me to show you god, I will point to the sun,” I had a sense of deja vu;
this is why I watch the sunrise, if for no other reason than to feel
there is a greater power in the universe.
And then Watts turns to the notion
that the more you try to forget yourself, the more you remember the self
you want to forget. Or, as I’ve thought of it since college, a rolling
stone gathers no moss. Watts is more eloquent, of course: "We crave distraction - a panorama of sights,
sounds, thrills, titillation into which as much as possible must be
crowded in the shortest possible time." Tell me about it. No
matter how many amazing, once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list experiences I
had, the more I couldn’t help asking, is this it? Six continents in a
year? Check. The Porsche to pick you up planeside and deposit you via
secret door into the next jetbridge? Check. But when I had major
surgery followed by complications and it was like, whoa......life is so
short....I had bargained with the universe, which as Alan Watts
evidently could have told me 20 years ago, was never going to be a
winning formula. Trading away present happiness for the idea of future
“security” was the worst idea ever. He needed six words where I needed a
decade and a half, but the end result is the same: "You cannot plan to
be happy." (And yet I’d been doing it for years and years and years. But
I digress.)
I loved, too, the focus on not
borrowing trouble from tomorrow, coupled with the acknowledgement that
"seeing that it is unreasonable to worry does not stop worrying." For
20-plus years, I have heard Chicago Tribute journalist Mary
Schmich's now-famous commencement address as the soundtrack of my life.
Though her words have stuck for decades now, and only ring truer by the
year, it is her bit on worry that first stuck in my craw back in
college: "Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum | The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind." I think she and Watts would have gotten on famously.
My one disagreement with Watts occurred when I read “in moments of
great joy we do not, as a rule, stop to think, “I am happy,” or “this is
joy.” I thought, oh, but I do. And then I read his caveat: unless
there is some anxiety that it will go away. Ah, yes, that....because
even in my moments of joy, I cannot wholly escape my neuroses. How many
moments have I thought, "I want to remember this," or (worse?) "I wish
this moment could last forever?" Too many to count, if I'm honest.
Ultimately,
if Jerry Maguire had Dorothy at hello, Watts had me from his own hello,
"by all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one
eternal darkness and another." Or, as Abraham Verghese wrote in Cutting for Stone in what is still one of my favorite literary lines: "We
come unbidden into this life and if we are lucky we find a purpose
beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the
common lot."
Consciousness does seem to be nature’s ingenious mode of self-torture.
