Getting Old, Letting Go

I took all of my Nintendo paraphernalia to GameStop recently and sold the lot. I could almost certainly have gotten more money if I had sold all that cool stuff on line, but I am lazy, I don't want to bother with haggling with people, and I didn't want to be tempted to keep any of it. I became intrigued with The Legend of Zelda several years ago as a sort of exploration in religious history. Zelda has a canon, pseudopigrapha, lore and legend, saints and historians and hagiographers. I found it fascinating to be able to study such an intellectual system that was, being only thirty years old, completely accessible. And, being a hardware junky, I bought several Nintendo consoles and games besides Zelda. Video games are, as not only I am aware, an important part of recent art history.

But, I found myself rather Zelda-ed out. I have been exploring Tamriel lately, the local of the Elderscrolls, rather than Hyrule. I was tempted to keep the Zeldoid devices as a prompt for comparative religious history, but there is so much Zelda material online that it's not really necessary. So, now someone else can enjoy the beautiful hardware that I have so enjoyed. These were things that gave me joy, but which I did not use.

At my age, I can look back over a wide range of collections of beautiful things that I no longer have: telescopes (four); cars (I don't even remember how many); kayaks (16); books (probably around  20,000); pottery (tons--there was a time when often gave sit-down dinners for 30 or more people.) I have friends who are hoarders, who have bits and pieces of as many parts of their past as they can hold onto in closets and shelves and attics and storage units, or scattered around the yard, because those things might be useful again, or because they are connected to important memories. My tendency to buy whole collections of things when I have an interest in a new subject I suppose I copied from my father, who was an avid hobbyist, but with serial hobbies. My ability to let them go must be from my mother, who would haul out almost anything if it wasn't nailed down, and if it was she might call 911 for help prying it loose. Who knows what she did with my telescopes and microscopes that I left at home when I went off to college. (I don't think she had any idea of what I had spent for those wonderful instruments. If she had, I think she would just have thought me foolish, but it probably wouldn't have kept her from clearing them out.)

The GameStop guy asked me, when he told me how little he could offer for my New Nintendo 3DS XL, if I wanted to keep. It was the second one I have bought, I gave the first one away to a kid whom I thought to need it more than I, but then Zelda-nostalgia convinced me to buy another one for at least The Ocarina of Time. I told him no. If I kept it, I would re-buy Majora's Mask, and A Link Between Worlds, and then I would just feel guilty because I didn't play them.  Abstinence is easier than moderation.

What I realize more and more is that I have plenty of stuff, both to enjoy and to do, but I am running out of life. I can buy just about anything I want, except for a Diamond DA 50--and more time. So, letting go of things that I might feel I should use frees me to do things that I enjoy more, that provide more joy now.

There is always a temptation, it seems, to go back. One of my current obsessions is the life and work of Cy Twombly, a painter I found fascinating when I was in high school but who sort of felt off my horizon when I moved to Chicago with the glorious clutter of the artists at the Art Institute.  When Twombly was 66, he began to spend more and more time in his home town of Lexington, Virginia. He did, however, keep exploring new ways to paint.  He seemed to enjoy the comfort of his history in Lexington, but he did not let himself become tied to it.

I am older than Twombly was when he returned to Lexington, and I understand the attraction of the past.  If I had as much money as Twombly, I might go back to the old country and buy a little place so that I could take vacations in the past.  But I don't have enough money, as Twombly did, to keep a place in the past and another couple of places in the present.  However, in the eight years since Twombly died, the internet has expanded fast enough that I can visit, at least visually, the little house I almost bought the last time I revisited the old country.

The house belonged to a woman for whom I worked as a sort of yard- and handyman when I was in high school.  I know how beautiful its rear garden is, with the first French doors and loggia that I ever saw. It was for sale about twenty years ago, and I almost bought it.  But I didn't.  Now I can look at it and be happy that I don't have to keep up the yard.  I can look at it and be happy that I don't have to endure the heat of its summers.  I can look at it and let go of a life that has become as imaginary as Hyrule, as imaginary as the images in Google Street View.  My present life may not be magnificent, but it is enough to keep me surprised each day by all the riches that present themselves.  It is enough to keep me up past my bedtime trying to cram more in each day.  I am at a stage of life and the world is at a stage of history when shell shock is the  pretty much the common condition of us all (Cue Alvin Toffler).  And yet I try to cram more in each day until my heart stops beating. I understand the attraction of the old.  But I also know that the old ain't there any more. Let it go.

The True Meaning of Christmas

(Spoiler:  I would never tell, even if I knew it. I like mysteries.)

A few weeks ago I had lunch with three Buddhists.  (Four if one counts the woman who had been a Buddhist but who now had dementia so that she didn't much participate in the conversation, although I wonder if she didn't best exhibit the true Buddha nature.)  It was an interesting lunch in many ways.  They were each students and practitioners of different Buddhist traditions, so much of their talk was about those differences.  They were all pretty advanced in their practices.   I kinda led them along for a while, showing as much innocence as I can muster before admitting to having been a practicing Christian priest. So for a while we shared stories of how many divergent/converging paths there are in the two religions, and of how many of the daily practices could be similar.

The ultimate question of the lunch was directed at me.  (I had been the one asking most of the questions most of the time.):  Did I still 'believe in' Christianity?  Not being sure what each of them might mean by Christianity, I said I would answer that question in terms of whether I thought that the Symbols of the Nicene Creed were true.  And I said, of course I didn't.  I mean, what does it mean, 'light from light'?  And wouldn't things be things become terribly cluttered with 'the resurrection of the dead'?  And I said that, of course I do.  It is a beautifully consistent and elegant way to express the relationship between the parts of the world, the causes and effects, and only claims to be dogma, that is, the best we can do to express the inexpressible.  Then we traded phone numbers and said we would meet again and have coffee--or tea, in the case of those non-believers who only drink tea.

But of course, we haven't, and I had forgotten about that conversation until I tried to watch a video stream of the Advent Lessons and Carols from Washington National Cathedral.  I did pretty well until the Dean of the Cathedral replaced the traditional bidding prayer for Lessons and Carols, which is about our listening to stories and praying for the world, with asking God to tell us the 'true meaning of Christmas'.  At that point I gave up, because I knew what followed would not be the wonderfully complex, multivalent ambiguities of a collection of stories from many places and times combined with songs from many places and times that reflect on those stories but an attempt to make the meaning of Christmas that we should elect Elizabeth Warren president of the United States.  Now, I could live with someone's suggesting that electing such a person president might be congruent with the meaning of Christmas.  But I can't accept that it is possible to  to reduce Christmas to one meaning, to claim that there is true meaning of Christmas and that we err to expand the feast to include pagan practices like yule logs and trees from old non- or ore-Christians sources or non-, post-Christian urban practices like stealing the baby Jesus from the nativity scene in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, or lighting the front of Saks in New York. 

If we really do believe in 'One God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible,' then we are  stuck with a lot of things that we find difficult to accept as true, such as Santa Claus being at one time in every department store in the developed world and coming down chimneys in houses with steam heat.  But, hey, if you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand it.

So, I would suggest that when someone tells you 'the true meaning of Christmas', smile, because that would perhaps 'rejoice [the Christ Child's] heart', and then put that meaning in a bag of gifts to ponder.  Be careful when you smile, though.  Someone might think you are the Buddha on the road and kill you.  But even if that happens, you can still look for the resurrection of the dead.