Day: March 10, 2010

Whenever the suitcase comes downstairs, Rose takes up position between the suitcase the door. She waits. She knows I am leaving. Does she want to come? I don’t know. She watches my back, always.

Hannah Arendt wrote beautifully about the notion of the “New Man.” Thomas Merton wrote of the New Man as well, a man who sought humility, kindness and generosity and who was connected to his friends and family. He sought a spiritual life, valued creativity and the life of the mind and worked hard to understand the fear that men have sometimes spawned in the world. And to use his gifts to life people up.

I love this ideal of the New Man, a hard thing to acheive but something I aspire to.

Tonight, heading to New York City. We are going to the opera with Maria’s mom, a lifelong opera lover. She is excited, so are we. I think when you do things for other people, you are almost always doing something for yourself. Generosity is a selfish act, and no less valuable for that. Back tomorrow morning.

A couple of years ago, I had given up on love, on an entire part of love and the human experience. I just didn’t think it was possible for me. I closed down and then, began to break down. I have a different notion of love. I see that many people give up on it at some point in their lives, just as society conditions them to give up on their dreams and stories and ambitions.

We are trained to see accomplishment and security as linked with money and 401 K’s and the money to pay for pills we might or might not need, depending on which survey comes out this month. I ran headlong into love, and I remember thinking, “I will not let this opportunity pass. I will not be closed to it. I will not let it go and live in the light and spirit of other people and their expectations of me and my life.”

There are all kinds of surveys and statistics about love and the odds of finding it – age, gender, geography, psychology. I don’t choose to live by these odds, but would rather make my own. If you give up on love, you are giving up on so much of what matters in life. Love, like anything worthwhile, is hard work. But to me, it embodies Mary Oliver’s wonderful notion of putting your lips to the world. And just living.

As the Buddhists say, time passes quickly. Use it.