Warm Recollections #37
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
Different religions are like different performances of Bach. Individual attempts to draw out the essence of something mysterious and unknowable — most crucially, a storehouse of intuition about the human condition and our secular souls — each perhaps bringing a useful perspective, but none capturing the uncaptureable.
Snowmobiling up a frozen river in Alaska is a pretty good analogy for life. There are patches of fresh powder where it’s all easy and fun. All too seldom. Then you will get stuck in ruts, which may feel okay but can be a hard ride too, when they get icy and unaccommodating or don’t go where you need to go. Then the sections of sheet ice, when you have to carefully work around thin patches, avoid the open cracks, and try to keep a consistent speed and your concentration levels very high.
It’s easy to forget how powerful sadness is. Perhaps no other emotion, even happiness, is so large, so capable — like the weather — of changing the look and feel of everything beneath it.
Months or years of lying will leave stains on your soul that are very hard to scrub out.
One of the things you learn as you get older is that the world doesn’t run out of new ways to be both great, and shit. Each epoch of your life comes with its own fresh-minted heavens and hells.
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How well I know “ the sections of sheet ice, when you have to carefully work around thin patches, avoid the open cracks, and try to keep a consistent speed and your concentration levels very high”.
Sometimes maintaining concentration requires superhuman effort and tension. And the hardest thing is maintaining a constant speed of movement when you really want to stop!!!!
“ Months or years of lying will leave stains on your soul that are very hard to scrub out.” I can clearly remember, as a kid in convent school, going to confession for the first time. It was vaguely terrifying, going into a little booth at the back of the church and having to fess up to the priest through a screen. I knew it was our priest, and he for darn sure knew who I was. Mortifying, as a child, to think up sins to confess because we were made to go on a weekly basis. What kid sins that much?! But I remember vividly a kindly nun taking me by the hand as I staggered weak-kneed from the confessional that first time, and whispering that my soul was now clean and white again because Jesus had scrubbed all the stains of my sins off it.