World in play

Posted in OPINION to Chuang-Tse Meets Jesus by P. Gregory Springer on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 8:00 am

Suddenly, there is this moment of clarity, one of the rare, lifting glimpses.  You never expect it.  Out of the blur of busyness, it just shows up, and even though you didn’t directly invite it because you were preoccupied with the constant stream of minutia, you have to 1) believe it exists, 2) be ready to receive it, and 3) take it on.

Maybe you are reading the paper. Maybe you are using the ATM.  Maybe you are looking for a parking place on campus and there one is, money already in the meter.  In the blink of an eye, everything is forgiven. Humanity regains its humanity. The clouds clear, and you feel good. The children again can have great expectations. The debts and doubts have been resolved. You accept things in the future perfect tense: everything will have been taken care of. You just know it, you feel it.

I can’t exactly say the blinding sun breaks out overhead, but something like that happens. I keep forgetting until it comes, until it surfaces like a forgotten submarine beneath the choppy sea that abruptly calmed. It’s like the thing the Grateful Dead sang about, whatever it was that they were singing about, of being “such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there.”

That place. That place where there is a there there and yet you can’t precisely name or describe it, although heaven knows it must seem, at this point, that I am trying to put it into words. 

I dug out my dog-eared 1966 Alan Watts book about the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta, The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are and flipped it open to the exact page I wanted:

“It’s like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible.  It’s also like the game of hide-and-seek... God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with.  He gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself.  He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars... He does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself.”

Be advised I am not referencing a maple syrup waterslide of optimism like a bubbly Panglossian Pollyanna. The game sometimes gets rough, no doubt.

It’s just that this particular now, this timeless time, you know everything is all right. You have never heard of Justin Bieber and have no desire to see him hit by a water bottle. It doesn’t matter that the DVR failed to record last night’s episode of Modern Family. You have no need or even the remotest desire for an iPhone. You can walk past the computer without considering updating your status. You are content with the half carton of vanilla yogurt in the otherwise empty refrigerator.

The point is –- and I hear a tsunamic sigh of “at last!” through the collective consciousness, the point is that....  Sorry, I lost my train.  It will come back.

In the six months I worked for the census, people complained. A woman at the Questionnaire Assistance Center in Chebanse complained bitterly about the government waste and the cost. She groused about the free census baseball caps (engraved with the name of the town), T-shirts, and baby bibs. She blamed Obama, because Obama is there to be blamed for everything.

Michael in Toledo was adamant about the millions wasted on portable computer gizmos to be used in the counting, and then discarded. (He claimed to know someone on the inside.) Pretty much everyone complained about the bureaucracy and waste they saw, and people -– towards the end especially, when some households had been contacted multiple times –- considered that it was all another government boondoggle, Constitutional requirement or not.

But the news came out the other day that the census had come in under budget by 22 percent. That’s almost a full quarter. Billions of taxpayer dollars had been saved.  People had cooperated in greater numbers than before. And Obama was off the hook anyway, since this was Bush’s census, prepared and in the planning since 2002.  Obama’s census will be in 2020.

All this time we were operating under the illusion of how terrible things were, wringing our hands and writing letters of complaint, when in fact the sun had been shining on our backs the entire time. We just were looking at things the wrong way. We had our glasses on backwards.

Sometimes the ascendancy of the Tea Party seems to parallel the rise of Nationalist Socialism in Germany during the last century. To me, at least. A movement begins as a seemingly small rumbling, born out of economic strife, making scapegoats out of minorities, making not-so-veiled threats of violence, with self-defined populist leaders who stir up fear and fervor at angry rallies.

But this time we are prepared. We’ve seen the precedent. We know enough to leave before the purges begin. We’ll be the survivors. If it comes to that.

Today, I’m done being angry. At this moment, there are no grumpy faces in any of the passing cars. There is no rush to fulfill ultimately futile errands. The cycles of serious business have been suspended in a shimmering moment that may stretch out for a considerable time, until again I lapse into the inevitable coma of workaday illusion.

Now there is no futility, just the perfect hum of the wheels turning, the passing sound of contentment and sweet solitude.