October 16, 2012. 3:15pm. Starbucks in Poughkeepsie.
How does one express the value of an experience? Is it how
much the ticket cost? Is it the length of time it took from your life? Is it
whatever you can put into words when the experience is over? Somehow, none of
these feel sufficient when I try to express this past summer in terms of its
value.
Just as one can sometimes find himself in a rut – find
himself mindlessly floating through the mundane actions that comprise his life
– I found myself caught in a philosopher’s dilemma of the same nature. I
drifted through the thaw of spring in a haze of my own thoughts. This deep
contemplation gripped and rooted me in a soil that quickly grew deficient. I
thought so much I had no energy to act.
This is just as dangerous, just as stagnant, as the mundane
rut. We are often told that life is about balance and moderation, and I never
have been able to quite strike it. I realize it’s been a while since I’ve
written and sometimes life just works out that way. Maybe I needed the break.
Maybe I got lazy. Nevertheless, this is for all of us out there arching toward
that blissful state of balance that we understand to exist but that always
seems just out of reach.
I spent the summer on a beautiful farm seeking health,
perspective and a little fresh air. It remains an experience, the value of
which I still ache to express adequately with words. It came to me in a time
when I needed it most and I imagine it meant more to me than I will ever know. Now
I stand on extremely conscious middle ground – looking back over what I’ve done
and what it means and also looking
forward to a new balance between thought and action, to a beginning. And I’ll
leave you all this week with a quote I found that expresses, in part at least,
the value of some of my recent experiences:
“By farming we enact our fundamental
connection with energy and matter, light and darkness. In the cycles of
farming, we carry the elemental energy again and again through the seasons and
the bodies of living things, we recognize the only infinitude within reach of
the imagination. How long this cycling of energy will continue we do not know;
it will have to end, at least here on this planet, sometime within the
remaining life of the sun. But by aligning ourselves with it here, in our
little time within the unimaginable time of the sun’s burning, we touch
infinity; we align ourselves with the universal law that brought the cycles
into being and that will survive them.”
– Wendell Berry
