Living the Questions: Part I

As promised, here is the talk I gave on my birthday, which I probably posted five years ago, but who would remember? The talk was almost exactly an hour long, so here I post in three parts. 

 

Once on an airplane, I saw a movie “Happy. Thank you. More please.” That title a  little 5-word mantra that says so much. Five years ago, I gave a talk in this very room for my 70^th birthday. In preparation for this next milestone, Re-reading it felt like I could have written it yesterday— and it holds up as something I can repeat five years after I wrote it. 

 

That mantra summarizes my last five years. “Happy.” Even in the face of the horrors of the news. The blessings of getting to continue to do what I love, what makes me happy, what seems to make others happy. The blessings of both the physical health and the mental energy to keep teaching, to keep writing, to keep singing with people from 3 to 103 years old, to keep working on piano, to keep walking, biking and swimming, to gather with my extended family. The blessings of the opportunities to keep working, keep teaching both kids and adults and the extra blessing of some heart-opening travel while getting to do so.  

 

One of the great lessons of aging gracefully is to dig deeper and rise higher into gratitude. Amidst all the inevitable disappointments of a human life at any age, amidst the decline of the body and the senses and the ravaging good looks, the only proper response is, as the movie title suggests, is “Thank you.”

 

And then “More please.” The gods answered my petition and as shown above, there was just the right amount of “more, please.” And here I publicly petition them again: “More please.” If you Level I students are interested in working with me, you can join me in that little prayer! I have no plans to leave any time soon, but these things aren’t always in our control. If all goes well, I’ll give this exact same talk with this exact same intro when I turn 80. And now to the talk itself, opening with a quote from poet Walt Whitman.

 

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

I was 16-years old when I first read this passage from Walt Whitman and for the rest of my life that followed, I ended up mostly taking his advice. Especially the part about reading and re-examining all I had been told at school or church or in any book or newspaper, not only dismiss whatever insulted my own soul, but embracing that which fed it. Living my life as a question that led to the next needed question. 

 

We begin life with questions. From the toddler saying “Whazzat?” to the 5-year old pestering you with “Why is the sky blue? What happens when you die? Why do I have to eat my broccoli?” to the eye-rolling teen asking “And just why do I have to be home by 11pm?” And then more profoundly, “Is this really the way the world has to be?”

 

At first, the adults are charmed by our questions, but we finally discover that the world grows weary of our questions, that schools and churches are more interested in answers, particularly in answers to the questions they ask (99% of schooling is answering questions no kid ever asked). Wanting to be nice and accepted and part of the crowd, we slowly stop asking the questions out loud and worse yet, stop asking them to ourselves. That curiosity that was the engine that moved us into life and set us off down the long, intricate path starts winding down. Yet the Soul, that unique threaded part of ourselves that is by our side our entire lives, thrives on questions and begins to die fed only on easy answers unquestioningly accepted by the multitudes.  

 

We discover that society likes answers, likes compliance, likes blind faith and acceptance. And so the drama begins— the inquisitive self pitted against the dogmatic institution. How we negotiate that mine-field says a lot about who we are and who we become. Of course, we love the New Age posters—"Go for it! You can be anything you want!!! Express yourself! Just be yourself!!”  But the fine print reads: “Except not in my class or not in my church or not in my family or not in my social group or not in my political party or not in my affinity group. We don’t really want to see all of you, so check it at the door or risk a life of loneliness and constant battle.”

 

It’s not easy to be yourself. Poet William Stafford tells us “The Way It Is” in his poem of the same title. 
 
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

And that’s just what I’ve done. Somehow, I managed to live 75 years of non-stop constant questioning. I never let go of the thread. A part of that thread was a lifetime as a troublemaker. I spent most of 3^rdgrade out in the hall, got in trouble often challenging the culture of my good-ole-boys high school, found a college that fit my way of being and accepted me and turned the troublemaker outward, marching on Washington in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War and identifying with the hippy counter-culture out to build a new world. Then a glorious 30 plus years building that world in the San Francisco School until I felt the school culture being threatened from within and in the next 15 years was suspended twice and put on probation for speaking up. And the same mixture with AOSA, at once feeling like I found home and then sometimes, speaking up when something smelled rotten in Denmark (and then the sweet redemption of receiving the AOSA Distinguished Service Award in 2018). A troublemaker. 

 

And yes, there was a price for it— people wanting me to shut-up for the wrong reasons (okay, occasionally the right ones!), people uncomfortable with the questions, the feeling that I’m part of many groups, but not wholly a part of any group.  Not entirely a teacher or a musician or a social justice advocate or a Zen student or a writer or even a music teacher in the conventional sense, or even an Orff teacher—and yet part of all of them and more. 

 

I think we all have that troublemaker in us and its intimately tied to the dreamer. Because side-by-side with the eye-rolling teenager is the dreamer, filled with pimpled doubts about how we fit in and what we can accomplish, but also starting to hope for something larger and daring to dream about something better. I think we all have had that moment when the world fully announced itself to us, gave us a glimpse of possibility, called to us “like the wild geese, over and over announcing our place in the family of things.” Can you remember yours? From those seeds of doubt married with dream, new questions came that could not be easily answered, that would need years, or decades or a lifetime to properly chew over and digest.