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Over the last two weeks I have been working on relearning the violin, an instrument I haven’t played in decades and one with a notoriously tough learning curve which probably means there is no possible route to mastery in my lifetime. I knew it was going to be this way and worked on lowering my expectations on m progress beforehand. With eight hours of practice in, I started thinking about the way people learn things like this in an organized way and wanted to set down my ideas.
I have been attracted to religion from an early age, though I have lots of
friends and acquaintances who have no interest in it or have an active dislike
of it. Towards them I bear no ill will, though I understand that this blog post
is probably not going to be their kind of thing.
For Lent I listened to the audiobook
version of Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward as my assignment and it was an
experience of a contrary way of looking and doing things. Rohr is a Franciscan
priest who has written many books on spirituality. This book is one which
concentrates on the part of life where the things that we were taught for years
as children and as new adults first getting established in the world, the things
which have always been promoted as the underpinnings of society and the basis
of a good life, no longer address the things which matter when a person reaches
full maturity, the “second part of life.” After a certain point, the frenetic
activities of establishing a career, making a home for oneself, living in a new
family or in community or by oneself, can all start to feel less relevant. They
call novels about young people concerned with fitting into the world
Bildungsromans but as far as I know, there isn’t a term for a story about the
similar kind of struggle at the other end of life (books like Philip Roth’s
Everyman).
I look at what my own life after work will be like, at what it is to stay on
top of multiplying health concerns, and at the accumulation of stuff I own
and this observation of Rohr’s resonates with me. Of course we’ve heard about
this before, from many other thinkers, but Richard Rohr spotlighted the problem
in a way that seemed to grow out of a solid basis in philosophy.
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One of the things I like best about the end of the year has to do with music,
which is one of the main ways I pass the time all year round. Now, I
don’t hang around in places featuring non-stop Christmas carols on loop so that
is not the kind of thing I’m referring to. I am also not big on the music
countdown segments that certain DJs like to put out during the last week of the
year. It is a different kind of nostalgia that gets me in the last days of the
calendar that I want to talk about for a little.
Twice a year, during Advent and Lent, I try to do some spiritual reading as a discipline, and this Lent I’m reading St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle, generally accounted to be a masterpiece of contemplation. The idea is that the human soul is pictured as a transparent castle containing many rooms, sort of a diamond cloister, the most impregnable fortress against the dangers of the outside world. It was natural that this member of a cloistered order would write based upon something she knew, of course, but the interesting thing will be how much I can make of this idea living in the world. Is a transparent mansion a cosy place, shiny and pristine as it is, or is it more like a prison to the modern reader?
In 2016 I went to a bunch of technical talks, none of which I intend to discuss
right now, and all of which armed with a cameraphone along with everybody else
in the audience. In this day of Slideshare and
official corporate tech blogs many of the presentations will make it up to the
web in pristine form, so why would anyone want to take a crooked, out of focus,
keystone distorted, and sometimes half second too late picture of the screen?
