Still Sundays

February 6th.

Why Sundays? Iqbal on Halley’s Comet. Longfellow: “Footprints on the sands of time.” “Nothing new under the sun” except…

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

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I was up later than usual last night. Saturday night. It was late enough according to the official time keepers—-the hands on my clocks—to already be a Sunday. A beginning of that moment on a Sunday where Saturday night holds the weight of the entire week gone by. Midnight. This also meant it had already been Sunday morning with daylight in other parts of the world. I hugged that thought: a Sunday that stretches across the globe like the horizon that drips off to an edge that doesn’t exit.

Why Sunday? Why take Polaroid shots of stillness with my words on a Sunday morning? A fair question, given all mornings hold a certain stillness before the minutes become a swarm of bees we ignore, knowing it is the minutes that create the nectar we yearn from the day. So do the hours between 3: oo a.m. and 4:oo a.m., they too hold a unique stillness. The hours that belong to a day that doesn’t exist. I come from those hours. My mother told me so: I was born around those hours. Perhaps that is why I am going to live my life about a time that only exists in my visions.

Why Sunday? I have always had an affinity for Sundays ever since I was young. I suppose it is because they are so definitive in the bliss and blues they hold: sundays are a union of beginning and completion. From the very early morning we are aware this day will not last. Most people even dread the next day: Monday. Sundays are a turnstile of moments where we enter one by one into a zone that we love and know we can’t hold on. Sundays remind me of how all days really are, we just don’t notice. Sunday mornings are my tribute to what I understand yet despite knowing I can’t always practice. It’s humbling and empowering.

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A dear friend and I ended our private tête-à-tête last week where she shut the door to the discussion by saying, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Although a common phrase now, I believe that is from Ecclesiastes. Few days after that, I bumped into an unexpected dialogue of the same nature. This time the individual, not a close friend, was pinning me with the corsage of compliments on my writing: “I wonder how you continue to write despite knowing it’s all been written before.” The following day I shared with a different person a short story I had written for a journal. Although my story was well received, it reminded this individual of a different story in some fiction anthology.

I have already reconciled with the ‘anxiety of influence’.  I also understand why I must write even if what I have to offer has already been written.  So what was I feeling? It was something new and I couldn’t quite articulate it until a new kindred connection asked, “Why do we have this desire to create something new? Original?” Yes! That was a better way of summarizing the span of the entire week’s unrelated but connected discussions.

Having spend some nights with these thoughts and taken them into my yoga practice, I understand the following.

Firstly, I don’t think most feel the burden to be original. If by some chance another consciously does, it is charged with ego’s seduction for approval. Secondly, for those select few who authentically feel this angst to be original it is not so much to be original but to share the reality that one perceives.

The poet Iqbal wrote,

Yesterday morning, 15th May 1910, at about 4, I saw that glorious visitor of our hemisphere known as Halley’s comet. Once in seventy-five years this superb swimmer of infinite space appears on our skies. The state of my mind was quite unique. I felt as if some thing indescribably vast had been closed up within the narrow limits of my clay; yet the thought that I could not see this wanderer again brought home to me the painful fact of my littleness. For the moment all ambition was killed in me.

When all ambition is killed and the only desire that remains is to project through a photo, a drawing, words, or music what one feels or sees we are nothing short of original. Always.

This grand undertaking to be in the now against the dam of past that no longer exists but somehow stills seems to generate enough power to short circuit our perception of the moment, with limited tools (a paintbrush! a thesaurus! a lens! a digital application!) makes artists champions in a match against time.

No doubt the eye sees what the mind already knows,* but the mind is weak against the heart that bleeds to be felt in the now.  A consistent practice to engage with the dialogue between mind and body teaches even deja vu is new.

There is indeed ‘nothing new under the sun’ except the Now.

Jonathan Haidt writes in the Introduction of his book, The Happiness Hypothesis:

Wisdom is now so cheap and abundant that it floods over us from calendar pages, tea bags, bottle caps, and mass e-mail messages forwarded by well-meaning friends. We are in a way like residents of Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel—an infinite library whose books contain every possible string of letters and, therefore, somewhere an explanation of why the library exists and how to use it. But Borges’s librarians suspect that they will never find that book amid the miles of nonsense.

Our prospects are better. Few of our potential sources of wisdom are nonsense, and many are entirely true. Yet, because our library is also effectively infinite—-no one person can ever read more than tiny fraction—we face the paradox of abundance: quantity undermines the quality of our engagement.

Words of wisdom, the meaning of life, perhaps even the answer sought by the Borges’s librarians—-all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little for us unless we savor them, engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our lives.

The attempt is not to be original in our creative endeavors but to savor, engage, question, and maybe improve, but most importantly, connect with how we understand now.

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I leave you with the stillness wrapped in one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Henry Wadswroth Longfellow:

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!–

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,–act in the living present!

Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

*Contrary to Appearances photography.

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