Even a Cliché Can Hold Truth

When I read this week's quotation, my heart sank a little. It seems so obvious, so banal. "Learn from yesterday. Live for today. Hope for tomorrow."

Then I thought again. The advice may be hackneyed, oft-repeated, but it is good advice, nonetheless. If we do not learn from our experiences, both from what we have done, and from what has happened to us without our own volition, we will make the same mistakes over and over again. Regretting events of the past will not change them. The only thing we can control is our response to what has happened. 

And I have blogged often about the benefits of living in the present, about being mindful about what is happening at each passing moment. Particularly here. In that post, I shared the Sanskrit affirmation, which I'd like to share again:

        

"Look to this day - for it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence:

the bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendour of beauty.

For yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision,

but today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness

and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day."

If we can learn to take this attitude deep into ourselves, I honestly believe it can make a difference. Because if we do learn from the past, and deeply appreciate the present (which is the only point at which time touches eternity) surely there must be a sliver of hope about tomorrow? It may be hard to find, if our personal experience of the present is sad and desperate, yet without hope that the hard time will end, we may succumb to despair.

In the ancient Greek myth, Pandora opened a jar left in her care, which contained sickness, death and many other unspecified evils, which were then released into the world. In spite of her best efforts to close the jar, only one thing was contained - Hope. Wikipedia explains, "Pandora's box is a metaphor for something that brings about great troubles or misfortune, but also holds hope. Symbolically, the box represents the curiosity and desire for knowledge that can lead to both negative consequences and positive outcomes. The evils inside the box can be seen as the challenges and difficulties of life, while the hope represents the optimism and resilience to overcome those challenges."

So yes, this week's quote is good advice: Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

Learning from Experience

 The Chinese philosopher and sage known to the West as Confucius wrote, "Experience is like a lantern facing backwards; it only illuminates the part of the way that we have already passed."

And that is true, so far as it goes. But I have an issue with his inclusion of the word "only" - because each one of us is the sum of our past experiences. The lessons they can teach us are so important, and can influence how we behave in the part of our lives that is to come. And we are able to apply what we have learned in our present and future lives, if we choose. There's a wonderful passage in Neil Gaiman's book, Neverwhere, in which the hero, Richard, has just entered the world of London Below, and is befriended by a girl called Anaesthesia. He has no understanding of how London Below works, and she has to look after him. At one point, they hide from some strangers, and when they have passed, Richard asks her, "What makes you think that they wouldn't have been pleased to see us?" 

Gaiman comments, "She looked at him rather sadly, like a mother trying to explain to an infant that, yes, this flame was hot too. All flames were hot. Trust her, please."

It is easier for us to learn from our experiences if we have someone wiser or more knowledgeable than we are to explain how the world works. Often this is a parent, but it may be a teacher or a minister or manager or other kind of mentor. Without such people, I think our lives would be more difficult, and we would be more prone to repeat our mistakes, rather than learning from them.

So for example, if we have been treated with kindness, we will be more likely to treat others that way. But if we have been treated badly, hurt, abused, oppressed, our experiences may have taught us that the world is an angry, dangerous place, and that others cannot be trusted. It takes a good deal of work and/or a wise mentor to hold and guide us through the process, to overcome the impact of negative experiences and move on; to learn to trust again.

A wonderful example of this was what happened in South Africa at the end of apartheid. Archbiship Desmond Tutu writes about this in God Has A Dream. "One of the things we learned in South Africa is that there is no true security from the barrel of a gun.... There is no peace without justice, and safety only comes when desperation ends. Inevitably it is when people sit down and talk that desperation ends. Negotiations happen not between friends; negotiations happen between enemies. And a surprising thing does seems to take place... enemies begin to find that they can actually become friends, or at least collaborators for the common good. ... Of course, you must have leaders who are willing to take risks and not just seeking to satisfy the often extreme feelings of their constituencies. They have to lead by leading and be ready to compromise, to accommodate, and not to be intransigent, not to assert that they have a bottom line."

Good things happened because people like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu himself learned from their past experiences that there had to be a better way of living, one which could rise above what their people had suffered, and work towards peace and reconciliation.

So let us shine that lantern on our past experiences and discern what we can learn from them, so that we can become happier, wiser, more compassionate people.

Learning vs Experience

"If you want to know something, ask an experienced person, not a scholar." This nugget of Chinese wisdom is something I have learned down the years.

In the first half of my life, I was a great believer in learning from books. And it served me well, for quite a long time. I finished school, got my degree in Librarianship, got married and settled down to live the rest of my life.

As time passed, I began to realise that there are so many things that you simply cannot learn from books, from staying in your head. So many things that can only be learned, or dealt with, overcome,  by hard-won experience, by living from a place of love and risk. Love. Vulnerability. Death. Generosity. None of these can be taught. They have to be experienced.

Book-learning is good, in that it gives you a theoretical grounding in whatever it is you are trying to learn, but it is not until you try to put that theory into practice that the learning "goes in". It is no accident that William Blake put Innocence and Experience at opposite poles. Until we have experienced something, all the book learning in the world will not help us. We will remain in a state of innocence (by which I mean unknowing) until our self-confident edges have been knocked off by some life experience.

Take counselling as an example. As part of my ministerial studies, I did a certificate in counselling skills. I read the recommended texts and thought I knew how to do it. But it was not until I and my fellow students started practising on each other, working in triads (one "counsellor", one "client", one observer) that I began to understand how the theory I had read about really worked. And the same thing happened in the three years of my spiritual direction training. The wise tutors at the London Centre for Spiritual Direction had it spot on - we spent the first half of each session on the topic of the week, and the second half on putting what we had learned into practice by "doing" spiritual direction on each other. Without all the practice I had undergone, I would not have had the confidence to hang out my spiritual director shingle.

And sometimes, I have read a book about a particular spiritual topic (Richard Rohr's Falling Upward comes to mind) and could not understand it at all, until I underwent life experiences which helped the meaning of the words fall into place in my heart.

Where the book learning can help, I think, is that the wisdom shared in books can support us through whatever experience we are having, so that we come out the other end wiser and stronger, kinder and more compassionate than we were before.

The Confidence of Experience

This week's quotation is by Sylvia Plath, "Nothing broadens the horizon, gives you as much confidence, as experience."

No idea why the quote is illustrated by a photo of a whale's tail, but there we are... :)

And yes, I agree with her, up to a point. I can remember the very first time I led worship for Northampton Unitarians, in February 2001. I had spent weeks preparing the service, anxiously rehearsing every element of it, changing this, tweaking that... On the day, I was a bundle of nerves, my hands shaking so badly that I had to lay my papers down. Now, 19 years later (how did *that* happen?) I still take a good deal of trouble to put a service together, but I am no longer afraid. I have led worship so many times that I have confidence that I know how to do this. And mostly, it goes reasonably well.

That's not to say I am blasé about the process... far from it. I believe it is one of the most important things I do, as a minister. It is a huge privilege, which I am always conscious of, to share my mind and heart with a congregation...

So experience does broaden the horizon, does give me confidence.

BUT

At the same time, I believe it is important to face the world as though for the first time, to retain a sense of awe and wonder, at the glories of God's creation, at the wonderful complexities of the human heart, at the serendipitous work of grace in the world. And that happened to me this morning... I went upstairs at 7.00 am, to do my morning sit. And my breath was taken away by two views, one out of my West-facing window, one out of my South-east facing window. Here they are... the setting moon and the rising sun.

Had I come up ten minutes later, this beauty, so transient, would have been and gone. Such a gift, such a grace! I was astonished by the beauty, by the glory. And so grateful for the eyes to see, the heart to marvel. Because I am still open to wonder, still "innocent", if you like. Not bored, not cynical, not "meh, seen it all before". Because I think that sometimes, unless we are careful, too much experience (of a bad kind) can steal our sense of wonder, close us down to awe.

So yes, experience is good, experience is helpful. But innocence is so important too...

The Sum of All Our Experiences

A few nights ago, I went to see the new Richard Curtis film About Time with my husband and my daughter. It was a lovely film, well up to his usual standard, but what I found interesting was our differing responses to it. I was much more emotionally affected by it than either my daughter or my husband.

image: derekwinnert.com


This made me realise that whatever you experience, whether it is going to the pictures, attending a lecture or concert, or going to a church service, you will react to what you hear and see in a particular way, depending on your past experiences. What you get out of a particular experience will very much depend on the baggage you bring to it.

We are all the sum of all our experiences. Maybe we need to bear this in mind, in our dealings with others, treading gently and lightly on their tender spots, knowing that our own are just as tender.

Anticipation and Experience

We have just come back from a lovely holiday in Rome. We visited many of the most famous sites - the Colosseum, the Forum, St Peter's Square, the Sistine Chapel, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, and so on. The sun shone, the sky was a deep and vivid blue, and there was even a gentle breeze. And it was amazing to see these iconic buildings and sculptures in real life, having seen photos of them so often before.


And yet the things that enchanted me about the Imperial City were not what I had expected. Yes, standing in St. Peter's Square or in the Colosseum or among the ruins of the Forum did take my breath away, and all these things were truly impressive, and I'm really glad I've seen them. But what I really loved about Rome was strolling through the narrow streets of Trastavere, savouring the beauty of the buildings and the joy of coming out of a narrow street into a sunlit square with the inevitable little jewel of a local church, or wandering around the lively Campo de' Fiori, looking at all the wonderful flowers and foodstuffs, and trying to decide what to bring home as a souvenir, or sitting outside one of the many restaurants in the sunshine, just people-watching. And the wonderful food, and the statues on every corner. And having the time to talk about life, the universe and everything with our two children-no-longer-children, with us on holiday for probably the last time.

If you had asked me, before we left for Rome, what I was really looking forward to, I would have enumerated the sites I hoped to see, and how impressed I expected to be with it all. But anticipation and reality were very different. The enchantment was not in the magnificent, in the impressive, but in the vivid light, the mellow paint of the buildings, and the serendipity of wandering freely, open to what we might discover next.