Everywhere I look I see signs of autumn.
Here in the upper midwest it is still warm before a cold front and rain moves in over the weekend. The first fallen leaves litter the lawn. Gardens are overgrown with flowers that seem to be growing wildly because they know it will soon be fall and they had better get everything in before the petals drop.
When the front moves in, the wind will shift to the northwest, dark clouds will lower in the sky, and the temperature will drop suddenly. We will look up at what I called in my youth “a wanderer’s sky.” The weather will have changed not only in the world but in our hearts. It will be time to follow the prompting of our hearts, the stirring of desire, to climb while we can climb in the mountains of another country.
When I lived along the mountains in Utah, autumn began at the peaks. Scrub oak and mountain mahogany turned red, aspen turned yellow, and fir and pine stayed green. There always came a September morning when the peaks were powdered with the first snow, then the snow came down the mountain, the snowline getting lower and lower until one day – as you sat over coffee in a warm cafe with a friend – the snow would blow into the valley and whiten the landscape and you knew that sooner or later everything would disappear and go under.
The weather in the heart is what matters most.
When I wrote this summer of my wife’s diagnosis of breast cancer, your response – those many of you who wrote notes of encouragement or shared your experience – was remarkable. Email streamed through my computer to my wife’s, providing a steady updraft when our anxiety was deepest.
One of the most powerful responses came from a man who wrote that he “lost my wife to breast cancer nine years ago. After her diagnosis we had just a few months together and in between the minutiae of trying to keep her comfortable at home we tried to close the book on our shared lives and cherished the moments left to us together. What I remember most vividly is watching the timer on the microwave tick on as I prepared her food, slowly clicking relentlessly toward what we knew would come, yet being so focused on the reality of THIS MOMENT and SHE IS STILL HERE that I don’t think I will ever entirely lose that sense of being here and now.”
My wife’s prognosis, after surgery, is more optimistic. The doctors think they got it all. We have time for another picnic. The intensity of our focus diminished as our anxiety diminished and we slipped back into the forgetfulness that seems to characterize so much of waking life. We didn’t want to forget what it meant to be so present to our own lives, we didn’t want to lose the ferocious clarity of that sharp light in which we had lived, but forgetfulness seems to be bred in the bone like denial to enable us to face the day without flinching.
And yet … we don’t entirely forget.
There is a Sufi story of a man at a bazaar who saw Death looking for him. He raced off and caught a train for New Delhi just as it pulled away. Death saw him as he left and said, ‘Funny, I wonder what’s he doing here. I have an appointment with him next Tuesday in Delhi.’
Autumn feelings. Autumn thoughts.
Inquiries from clients about speaking are increasingly skewed toward e-commerce. There is an urgency in their voices because everyone is afraid of falling behind. In a business climate in which paranoia is a benchmark, that’s appropriate. In real life, though, it’s not. There is no ahead or behind in real life. There’s only life.
The translation of the content of our symbolic lives into the digital domain is nearly absolute. All commerce is e-commerce. We don’t talk about “telephone commerce” because telephony is ubiquitous. We have been assimilated into the way the digital manipulation of images and symbols has transformed how we speak, how we think, how we feel. Even those who aren’t wired are being rewired by those who are.
Software, chips, and digital devices grow, live, and die faster than fruit flies. The length of a generation contracts, and the limbo bar of the age at which people make millions on IPOs goes lower and lower. But that’s the Little Picture. The Big Picture is only seen when we are seized by ultimate concerns and everything else vanishes, when we are focused on “the reality of this moment” and that which abides.
And what abides?
Once I thought I had answers to that question. Now all I have is questions.
What is the particular gift this day has given me? Who have I loved, and have I dared to love them as well as I could? Have I contributed to the well-being of another, have I enhanced their sense of dignity or expanded the possibilities of their lives? Have I flown as close to the fire at the heart of the mysteries of love and knowledge as I dare? And of everything I have received, have I given anything back?
Are those questions really about the digital world? Yes, because the digital world is the world now. Nobody saw exactly how it would happen, just as nobody got e-commerce right. All the predictions were way off. God help the prognosticators in a world that lurches here and there like a lovable drunk. We don’t know what we don’t know. But we do know that shorter days, the first snowfall in the mountains, and the aching of our hearts when we love are all somehow inextricably bound together and imaged in the digital world like autumn leaves of a thousand colors that are falling fast, oh fast, and are swept along the street in the wind, while the fractal branches of trees uplift in all the possible patterns that exist into the starless sky.
