What do Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, Buddhism, and Thoreau have in common? In the first year of my teaching 1972, I began to teach Our Town, and though it wasn't popular to teach into the 21st century, I continued teaching it through 2010 until I retired and never tired of it.
You may remember that in that play Emily has died in child birth. When she comes back from the dead to relive her 12th birthday, she realizes that we human beings do not appreciate life while we live it. She spoke these words, and I immediately knew them to be true (the italics are mine):
"Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!
I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave.
But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up.
Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?
Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some."
Now fast forward in my teaching life to about 20 years later in the mid 90s when I began to teach about the major world religions through literature. Besides Christianity, my favorite of those faith traditions was Buddhism--primarily because one of its main tenets is mindfulness or being fully awake:
The Buddha advocated that one should establish mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna) in one's day-to-day life, maintaining as much as possible a calm awareness of one's body, feelings, and mind. Mindfulness, which, among other things, is an attentive awareness of the reality of things (especially of the present moment) is an antidote to delusion.
As I thought back to the religion that I am most familiar with--Christianity--I realized that Jesus lived an incredibly mindful life. Didn't Christ live in the moment and encourage us to do the same? Wasn't he fully awake and alive? Spiritually in tune.
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| Excuse the words on the picture, which I cannot erase and which have nothing to do with my blog post! I actually have this picture on my wall. It is one of my favorites of Jesus. |
"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life . . . do not worry about tomorrow." (Matthew 6) Isn't Jesus telling us to "stay in today" in this passage? "Let the little children come to me . . .for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." (Matthew 19) Jesus tells us to become like little children if we seek the kingdom of God. Before society (we) corrupts them, don't children live fully in the present moment?
And then there is always Henry David Thoreau's Walden, telling us to simplify, slow down, and live in the present, "Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature." Thoreau didn't just write about mindfulness, he lived it, especially at Walden Pond. He was teaching us that if we don't live mindfully, we will miss our lives. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "We must learn to reawake and keep ourselves awake." "Only one in a hundred million [is awake enough for] a poetic or divine life." Isn't that the Stage Manger's answer to Emily's question in Our Town, "the saints and poets maybe"?
Thoreau cautions us about not living: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach me, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Still and all, though intellectually, I knew that mindfully was the way to live and that most of those whom I admired (living and dead) lived in the present, I was too much in the "doing" mode. Always doing, doing, doing, or if not doing, thinking about doing or going, going, going. Making long lists of what I "had" to do, where I had to go.
Why/how had I come to believe that living was all about doing and going? Running errands, working, cleaning, organizing, shopping, cooking, washing, planning lessons and grading papers, taking care of my child and pets and yes, husband, gardening, weeding, raking, paying bills, etc.
Wasn't I on that proverbial hamster's wheel? But how to get off?
Years and years ago, someone had said to me, we are human beings, not human doings. And I wanted to learn how to be more of a human being. But I didn't know how.
Oh I've had my moments: floating down the Hiwassee River in the late afternoon when the sun sparkled off its crystal clear waves, walking to school underneath the white pines with the early morning dew drops sparking off their evergreen needles, looking at my students' sparkling eyes and young faces as they comprehended the lesson for that moment. Apparently, one thing that I have discovered for sure is that living in the moment is a "sparkling" experience!
Thoreau said, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn. To be awake is to be alive."
With that in mind, I have been doing--there's that word again--some research on mindfulness. In my next blog post, I would like to begin teaching us how to be more mindful, more awake, more alive in our lives. Because it's never too late to learn how to really live! And we shall start with the "being" mode versus the "doing" mode of living and how to tell the difference. So stay tuned, Dear Reader!
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