The Layers of Life
Life goes on around us at all times whether we are paying attention or not. It is very hard to say how engaged we should be with every aspect of it at any given moment. I use the differences at the moment between my friend Mike and myself as an example. It is 8am and I am listening to Jose Diaz-Balart on MSNC while I am writing this story. When I woke up at 5am, I reviewed my inbox and read whatever late breaking news was in there. I can’t be sure when I will next check the news feeds, but I think its safe to say that there won’t be two hours of the day that go by without my checking up on the latest breaking news. My late afternoon has me watching several hours of news and then again, before I head off to bed, I get a late night update just to be sure I haven’t missed much. Plenty of the news is repetitive and I feel I can recognize when I am just getting regurgitated news and can thus turn the channel. By contrast, I know that Mike is quite adamant about not listening to the news during the day and only updating himself in the early evening. He won’t admit it, but I suspect that if anything earthshaking happens during the day, he will hear about it through some means. It is a philosophical approach about how you choose to live your life. For much of my working life, I very much followed the Mike approach. I was simply too busy to spend my day listening to the news. The change in my patterns has come about through some combination of being retired and having more discretionary time on my hands and the advent of an over-abundance of breaking news of a distressing nature. That has tended to coincide with the Trump years and I have a hard time not thinking that has something to do with my concentration on the news cycle.
This reality and these different approaches to getting through the day are on my mind for some reason this morning and it has made me think about the broader context of life. When I go somewhere new, I look at the sights with fresh eyes as we all do. If there is a beautiful ocean or mountain view, I ask myself where I would want to position my home if I lived there. It has always struck me that you can either live on the mountain and look out or you can live off the mountain and enjoy looking at the view of its grandeur. The same can be said of the ocean. If you are right up against it on the beach, you have far less of a view of it than if you stand back and position yourself to get a panoramic view of the coastline. When I think of days gone by, I have noticed that few people positioned themselves for the views and much more located their homes based on other criteria like safety and security from the elements. After all, housing is really about shelter from the elements at its most basic level, and that was certainly so in those days. I imagine if one had asked those folks why they didn’t focus on their views, they would have looked at you funny and said that the views were all around them every day anyway, so what was the big deal? What that translates into, in my opinion, is that the priorities of life were such that the views fell lower on the list than did other issues of comfort and convenience. I imagine that those folks could appreciate a nice view, but they did so in context. It was a layer of life, but not necessarily in the foreground.
Life has a way of layering itself against us because there is a realization in most quadrants that we can only focus on so many things at one time and yet we cannot stop the world from going on about us. This layering is a beautiful thing and I believe it is one of the things that gives our lives so much texture if we choose to recognize it. There is always a lot of advice forthcoming that it is important to be present and in the moment. We are always told to keep our eye on the ball and to not dwell on the past or spend too much time dreaming about the future. While I understand the reasons for that advice, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a better way to think about that. I have always been more a person of focus rather than a multitasker, but I think that is a different issue. To me, I don’t think this is about how you operate in the moment, but more about your level of awareness about all the other layers that grace your life at any given moment. Which is a better way to live your life? Should you spend your day worrying about the state of the world and the conflagrations going on all around the world at any moment, or should you be oblivious to the broader world around you and just stay focused on your feet, putting one foot in front of the other with great focus and single-minded purpose? The clear answer is that neither is best and neither need be so all or nothing. We all have very facile minds and while we all have different capacities, most of us can afford to give sufficient mindshare to the many layers of our life that surround us.
This cerebral breadth is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms. I recently read The Secret Life of Trees, which lays out a reality that even trees have feelings and communicate with one another through their root systems and with the help of things like fungi. As much as that is more capacity than we generally assumed for trees, the truth is that trees have a fairly one dimensional view of the world. They literally are oblivious to what happens outside their sphere of influence and are all about the basic processes of gathering light and water for the sustenance of life as they know it. I think it is fair to suggest that they are able to retain aspects of the past and presumably use that to set their course in the present, it is much harder to assume that they have any capacity to consider the future or how broader world events might impact them. They seem to be more like a memory disk than a processing circuit with intelligence. We spent a lot of years underestimating trees, so who knows, maybe they do have an ability to anticipate the future, but I think it is still fair to say that their cerebral flexibility is simply nowhere as great as ours as humans. It is our flexibility that makes us so different, whether we are comparing ourselves to trees or chimpanzees.
I guess that is my message for the morning. I may want to live life in the moment and focus my attention, but that does not force me to ignore the layers of the world that I am blessed to have set before me. We are said to have eight senses. We all know the first five as learned in kindergarten. We can see the world around us and at some distance. We can smell the world nearest to us and even taste the things we choose to place on our palate. We can hear what goes on in between Thomas realms. And, of course, we can reach out and touch whatever is in our reach. But we also have a “sixth sense,” called proprioception, which allows us to keep track of where our body parts are in space. Then there is the interoceptive sense, which is the sense that helps us understand our body’s internal sensations like hunger, thirst, being hot or being cold. And last, but not least is what is called the immune input. It is the sense that quietly and subconsciously detects microorganisms and delivers the information to the brain to combat them. These all make sense even though some or all of the last three are less obvious.
So, you see, we have all the tools we need to keep track of all the layers of the world that life presents to us and I feel it is our duty to ourselves and the world at large that we work to stay in touch with all the layers of life.