Learning Something Here

Apparently my marks in the school of hard knocks are unacceptable because I keep getting assigned the same lessons over and over. I’d like to believe that I already knew what I read in the meditation the other day in Forward Movement: “I've heard that recovering alcoholics, when they experience a craving for a drink, often suck a sweet or toffee instead. Getting rid of a bad habit demands more than just not doing something—the vacuum carved out by refraining from something harmful cries out to be filled, and unless we fill it with something positive, we may find ourselves back at square one, or worse.” Maybe I’m more of a hard-headed German than I realized. I just keep butting heads with the same old habits. Or maybe the Scots-Irish heritage claimed on my paternal side—according to some sources, rugged, individualistic, freedom-loving frontiersman—requires that I be challenged regularly and routinely. Hardly rugged here, but I gladly claim a love of freedom that seems somehow to have eluded me for 60 some odd years. Likely, I’ve simply, confoundedly been a prisoner of myself, genetically predisposed and conditioned to believe that I couldn’t walk through a doorway in a wall that doesn’t even exist.

“I played with fire, did counsel spurn/Made life my common stake; But never thought that fire would burn/O that a soul could ache.” —Henry Vaughan (British metaphysical poet, 1621-1695)

We’re odd little creatures with proclivities for one thing or another. As children we learn to respect fire. I recall a lifelong fascination with burning trash. Why as a child I loved to gather and set fire to debris I don’t remember. This instinct one time found me in what seemed like peril when a burning piece of paper wrapped itself around my blue jeaned leg, as I tended a fire that I had started. I couldn’t have been more than seven because we still lived near downtown Houston. All these years later, I can visualize only me with a rake in my hand, the paper clinging to my pants leg, and my daddy coming to the rescue. No doubt, I got a “Son, I told you so”, but I don’t remember a spanking. I remember few spankings. Yes, I have a healthy respect for fire and for the instruments of living made hot for some necessary purpose. You don’t burn in the middle of the summer, when the grass like parchment is ripe for disaster. That’s why we have burn bans. You don’t grab a hot skillet without a mitt. How many times have I failed that test in the throes of a kitchen emergency? No big measure of anything other than instinct to remedy a situation. Perhaps habits are instinctual as much. The result is the same, regardless of the catalyst. Some serve us well, others not.

Late in the fifth decade of my life of lessons a professional friend described me as a natural-born problem solver. I smiled, never having claimed that for my own, not really, even though my mind starts figuring out things instinctively as soon as I’m faced with a dilemma. Let someone tell me about his own wall, and I seize the challenge, sometimes to my detriment. “Harold, you don’t have to understand everything,” I was once advised, in a friendly manner, by someone who ended up telling me that I just need to let some things be. The chaplain who called on Mother during her long illness offered some advice one day, as I catalogued my efforts to get through to Mother, trying, almost in desperation, to help her understand that it could be easier than she had chosen for it to be. “What,” I replied, “pray unceasingly?” I asked, a little begrudgingly, as the chaplain waited patiently to make her suggestion. Smiling, she said, “Just try being silent.” I never got there, and my mother didn’t change either. Damn, I hate being an old dog who hasn’t changed much in all these years.

As I watched “The Trip to Bountiful,” last night, Horton Foote’s beautiful screenplay about an elderly woman’s efforts to reclaim some of her past, only to be thwarted repeatedly by a strong-willed, self-absorbed daughter-in-law and an equally weak son, I embraced its tender, yet strong and affirming message. In the end life is about getting on and getting along. It’s okay to give in sometimes, in spite of our instincts, in spite of what we believe is right. In a late-night conversation, as the old woman passes the time in the bus station of a small Texas town, the station attendant comments that he has two grown children, “raised the same”, one drinks and the other one doesn’t. Figure that out. Figure out why a selfish daughter-in-law digs in her heels, hell bent to deny an old woman a sweet, nurturing visit to her heartland. No, she couldn’t go home again, but having made an attempt, she was reconciled to her responsibility in making the best of a difficult situation. Just give me a little room for making peace. I know I can do it if I believe I have a choice.

Certainly, our efforts to figure things out are at the heart of self-preservation, both individually and collectively. How else did we come up with social order and religion? The science of either of those is for someone else to analyze. I know that I’m sharing this planet with lots of people who just keep getting it wrong, including myself, and it is our failure to get it right, in spite of genuine effort, that keeps things moving, sometimes forward. We are victims of our nature and our habits. Christians want to call it sin. Am I too hard headed to just admit, finally, that I am a sinner? “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,” I recite each Sunday from the Book of Common Prayer. In the middle of the night, awake and working my list of mistakes, some more clearly definable than others, I pray the same. Help me change. I want to change. Help me not keep doing the things that cause me all kinds of misery, make me want to give up, sometimes.

Surely there’s more to it than sucking it up and going on. Maybe I just have to accept that this old dog learns the hard way. Maybe I just have to keep reminding myself of what Grandma Fuchs said often: “If you can’t listen, you have to feel.” Maybe I need to work harder at learning from my hard-earned habits. Maybe I just have to let some things be. After all, jumping into the fiery bath hasn’t done too much for me, so far. It’s made me wary sometimes, distrusting of myself and others, plagued by regret, apologetic, sad. Even though I already knew it, I welcome being reminded that abandoning old habits, ones which clearly do not make for a better life, insists that I replace them with something, simply good. I don’t want to argue about the relative value of good. I’ll just go with good because I know what it means to me.

Learning Something Here—Santa Fe, New Mexico (October 29, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis