The Harried Mystic

“Where did you go to, if I may ask?” said Thorin to Gandalf as they rode along. ‘To look ahead,’ said he.’ And what brought you back in the nick of time?” Looking behind,’ said he.” — J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit)

In my early childhood days of high play and fantasy, I traveled a city made of light, and conjured an empire inside an evergreen tree with teeming communities residing in holiday ornaments. A spoon was a spacecraft and a cardboard box, a busy hospital. In those days of youthful myth-making, my journeys to foreign lands needed no more than a few random objects and material stand-ins. It was a time of seemingly timeless, patient reverie, unencumbered by reasons why not, free of the locks and bolted gates of older age.

Some time later, I visited the illuminated mind of H.G. Wells and his magnificent time machine. I traveled with the unnamed time traveler forward to the timid and meek Eloi, confronted the monstrous Morlock, and felt the love of Weena for the traveler. I marveled with him at the mysteries found in parallel worlds undreamt of by timekeepers and makers of “to do” lists.

I stood once as science officer on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise awaiting the Captain’s question: “What do you make of it?” I teleported to the surface of numerous worlds with “away teams,” and dined with exotic intelligences from alien senates. I negotiated with enemy combatants with hopeful conviction of a peaceable solution.

I mourned the pillage of Troy, and marveled at the strange, the wonderful, and the deadly as a crewman of Odysseus. I stood invisible beside Pip as he nervously approached Miss Haversham in her decrepit dining room filled with cobwebs and dust, and I shuddered and then marveled at Johnny Tremain’s courage in picking himself up after his hand was seriously burned by molten silver from a cracked crucible.

These and so many more journeys stirred up the embers of my fascinations, quickened my heartbeat, and accentuated my joy in being alive. How I wished then that I could be a sojourner on moonbeams crisscrossing the bounds of time with playful abandon, uncovering mysteries and new worlds, unraveling great riddles, and seeing myself as I was, am, and am yet to become.

And, then, with the instantaneity of a super-nova, a crack of thunder, and the illumination of a bolt of lightning, the truth was there in plain sight. I am, as you are, a veteran time traveler in earnest, with such travels ahead that have infinite reach, and unimaginable depth.

More than spice around life’s edges, these travels inform the spirit, awaken non-linearity, and excite thinking about how to navigate challenges. The journeys bring richness and freshness, and alchemical power. Such is the awakening spirit implicit in scenario thinking, business leadership in search of “blue oceans” in which to fish for new opportunity, and the quantum leaps we need to take as we grapple with uncertainty and change.

The arrow of time appears straight but is, actually, bent, and arrives before leaving its bow. We think we see it move away from us toward a target: an illusion.

Could it already be at the target drawing the past toward it to complete the arrow’s assigned passage through space-time? Movement and time are constructs of our invention. My sense of time’s passage is experienced by the same consciousness that traveled with Well’s time traveler, moved through tree branches to visit glistening cities sealed in ornaments, and awoke once as an insect with Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.

We begin our travels in time before we can really reflect on what it means, and when our language doesn’t yet extend to the descriptive nuances that capture those youthful excursions. Yet, our longing to make the imagined real is so often later fulfilled when science fiction becomes science fact.

Time travel is a profound gift of human consciousness that we too easily allow to wither through inattention and indifference. We push the gift into the recesses of Mind carried there by the strong currents stirred up by the incessant round of “so much to do, so little time.”

All things in moderation, opined Socrates. So, we do well to ask ourselves “how do I recover the faculty that distinguishes humanity from all other life forms; the ability to span time, warp space, and ride the wormholes of the mind while yet accomplishing what needs to be done? A cynic may exclaim, “Why bother?” A pragmatist may complain “What for?” A materialist may challenge “With what gain?” A politician might inquire “Are the polls showing support for it?” And, then, the wide-eyed child of whatever decade or season of life simply asks, “How soon and with whom?”

Why bother? Time bending, space shifting, visiting new worlds, and uncovering the possible lurking somewhere within mounds of the expected are the cornerstones of our survival as a species. These are the faculties that channel the flow of our creativity and wonderment as we gaze around the corner anticipating the next big surprise.

These skills are not luxuries but the warp and woof of necessity. Might it be that we age faster after relinquishing our gifts of time spanning? Is it possible that our anxieties and discontents are traceable in large measure to letting our capacity for doing  so to atrophy through protracted inattention?

Where will we find the remedy for the arrested development of this essential human faculty? How do we enliven it so that our space-time travels can begin anew, re-enchant our lives, and excite the bigger, bolder, broader, and mind-tickling panoramas? The answer lies with the poets, and the exquisite prose of those who capture fleeting thoughts, tenderly nurture them to maturity, and present them to us as essays, novels, novellas, plays, operas, or short stories?

It lies between the covers of a mystery, or a retelling of days gone by that offers new “what ifs” to ponder. These artists are the music makers who strike just the right frequencies as they pluck strings of ideas. It is in our resonances with the symphony of these many voices that our lost faculty is rejuvenated. Time travel requires the reawakening of the Renaissance ideal; a Da Vincian effulgence.

We will find our time machine in a deep cave where the Morlock entombed it. To release it, we must traverse the full spectrum of worlds conjured by the greater community of mind and spirit. We need to read from all genres and styles and resist the temptation to stay with the few, the popular, or the familiar. Our task is to go on regular weekly retreat with a full spectrum cocktail to incite the mind to resume its play of years ago.

Let us feast well, savor each portion, and avoid the fast food rush to just get it over with, or to push it off to the side table of occasional sweets and condiments. When our hearts are thus inspired, we will return to ourselves, and join the dance of the cosmos. We will then be able to affirm with Walt Whitman “I am multitudes.” We will have mastered time, slowed it down, and tamed its rush to grayness and severity. And, after doing so for many years, perhaps, we too can join with “Dr. Who” as Time Lords. In the meantime, we are all on a mission to travel time in pursuit of the better questions that open fathoms previously obscured by darkness.

Such a psycho-spiritual regimen is a healing force in a world made sore by the utilitarian, prosaic, trivial, and endless processions of debates about nothing, empty sound bites, and talking heads.  It is more than a palliative or escapist entertainment into which category reading for pleasure has for too long fallen. We are called to renew the virtue of the “liberal arts” as tools in service of insight. The art of reading with the whole mind restores an essential rhythm and centeredness in the depths of Mind. By so doing, we live many lives and time is no longer our enemy.

This Quantum Therapeutic has a structure: a phrasing in eight parts, or voices, with emphasis tailored to each person based on a sound understanding of where, how, and to what degree the faculty of which this essay is a celebration has been constrained and relegated off to the margins by the seemingly urgent and obligatory.

In brief, the eight parts are:

1. Establish a personal cross-genre, cross-style, and cross-cultural “Rule of Reading.”

2. Watch for narrative surprises and the whirlpools of energy, enthusiasm, warmth and cold, empathy and antipathy that get generated along the way.

3. Consider characters and phrases with whom and with which you identify and from whom or from which you recoil, and set time aside to reflect on the root of that identification and rejection

4. Hold two or more evolving plot lines in mind from multiple sources at any one time and watch how they mysteriously interleave in your thinking.

5. Expect the twists and turns that build drama and stay with them awhile; read over the moments of disquieting or gratifying surprise. What is the true source of how you feel?

6. Consider what’s missing that you expected? Why did you expect it? What does it mean to you that it’s missing? And, if it were to appear, how would things change?

7. Deepen the dialogue with the characters and then the author: If you met with the characters, what would you ask? What would you wish for them or how would your conversation go?  Look into the life of the author. Do you see the strands of his or her life, dreams, wishes, and fears arising both in and between lines of the living text?

8. Write the reading forward: Where would you take it from the point at which the author closes the chapter or the story? Are there alternative endings you would enjoy exploring? What do they teach about you?

This process represents a summation of the years of delight that I’ve enjoyed in spanning time and looking back from points ahead. It emerges from the coalesced deposit of storied, provocative, and always stimulating journeys that I’ve been privileged to enjoy: facilitating leadership experiences, spending time with courageous sojourners in coaching and clinical settings, and transiting the intersections of science, theology, philosophy, spirituality, mathematics, music, and religion.

This practice of narrative enchantment and re-awakening through story and metaphor underscores the power of the Renaissance ideal: reading with wide rather than acute angled viewing, studying diverse fields of inquiry and discovery, and allowing that grand diversity to braid itself into the strongest of fibers. Health of mind and spirit surely depend on the robustness and resiliencies of those fibers whereby all our acts can be a legacy noted for being as wise as they are, hopefully, smart.

© The Harried Mystic, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.