Way of Life
Monday, January 12, 2004
Pandora's Hope
In a previous entry, I wrote about how rare it is that someone really finds “true love” in this world. For a long time, I had cherished the idea that I might be able to create a truly happy and successful family, but after some disappointing experiences, I began to believe that I had failed. I seemed to be, like so many other people, condemned to live my life in solitude, or at best, in a pale shadow of my impossibly idealistic dream.
My dear mother took issue with that. In an email, she wrote to me:
Minor criticism: I wished that the article on marriage would have been more upbeat. There are some good things about being single.
At first, I wanted to respond to her that I didn’t feel upbeat about marriage at the time I wrote that article, and how could I have written something that I didn’t feel? But then I started to think that my negative attitude was the fruit of a belief that, for whatever reason, I was chosen to suffer in this life, to have my dreams dashed to the ground instead of fulfilled. It seemed impossible that things could have happened as they did if this were not true.
But then I happened upon a very special film in a local DVD store, and it started to make me think again, about the great stories that people have always told and remembered through the ages. How many of them ended with the hero realizing that he was simply chosen to fail and suffer in this life? How many of them allowed our hopes to die? Nearly each story which lasts in our hearts is a Pandora’s Box of turns and disasters, most of them far worse than anything I have known. And in so many of them, the main characters feel exactly the same things that I have felt, and for a moment, they too lose sight of what dreams they know are still worth holding on to.
In the end, that may be the purpose of stories—all of them must contain tension and conflict, or else our hearts will not acknowledge them as true or interesting. Our very lives are about resolving the tensions and conflicts we detest so much, and we require that a story bring out in us a new knowledge or a new faith in our power to be the heroes that our lives require us to be.
Because, while the characters of our favorite stories may be up against all the forces of evil combined, their journeys are just reflections of our own, blown up bigger for us to understand and relate to in a new way. Might it not be heroic to keep on believing in the possibility of love and happy family life—while at the same time appreciating the beauty of being single? In some ways, we are always alone—in our secret thoughts, and in the dreams that even we forget upon waking in the morning. Yet in so many ways, it is only through the others, whom we dare to allow into our lives and hearts, that we learn to make sense of who we are, and come to understand what being alone in a healthy way really means.
We began the journey of life at our mothers’ breasts, drinking on the milk of dependence. Slowly, we have learned to be individuals. And yet we must transcend even that independence in order to become interdependent on those whom we love. In that glorious adventure of relying on others as well as ourselves, hope is indeed a most valuable thing.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Imagine
Ever since the turn of the millennium, each New Year’s Day has felt like a leap into the future. Here it is: January 7, 2004— already seven days into the third year since 2001: A Space Odyssey became alternate history rather than a possible future. We still have no monoliths, aliens, or crazy space stuff. There’s plenty of crazy people stuff though—but we’ve been living with our own craziness for so many centuries that now it seems almost normal.
As you already know, I’ve enjoyed science fiction since I was a kid. It’s filled with imagination, creativity, and it has often been the spark that pushes real science in new and interesting directions. It discusses problematic issues of technology and philosophy before they even become real issues. For example, when the news first started talking about the cloning controversy, many people familiar with science fiction felt like they’ve been down that road already, and long ago formed an educated opinion about cloning, wether for or against it.
In many ways, it is just as important to look into our future as it is to look into our past. Making sense of history has always been a way to make sense of ourselves, and learning where we’ve been, it is said, can tell us the most about where we are going. Yet it is the art of imagination that actually dares to directly ask the question of what we are going to do with our future, and it’s myriad answers provide us with a myriad possibilities to dream of.
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Christmas Changes
The history of Christmas has been something like the “telephone game” we played as children, whispering a sentence from ear to ear and finally ending up with something quite different at the end of the line. Millennia before Christ was even born, people had already been celebrating the winter solstice in late December, as the long nights finally started getting shorter and warmth began to return to the world. The Romans, for example, celebrated this as a tribute to Saturn, the god of agriculture.
Later, when the leaders of the church decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus for the first time (more than three hundred years after the fact), they decided to hold it very close to the date of the Roman “Saturnalia Festival”. Yet while “Christianity had, for the most part, replaced pagan religion” by the Middle Ages, the original form for celebrating Christmas remained very much the same:
“On Christmas, believers attended church, then celebrated raucously in a drunken, carnival-like atmosphere similar to today’s Mardi Gras… The poor would go to the houses of the rich and demand their best food and drink. If owners failed to comply, their visitors would most likely terrorize them with mischief. Christmas became the time of year when the upper classes could repay their real or imagined “debt” to society by entertaining less fortunate citizens1”
In fact, the modern form of Christmas (in the spirit of Silent Night) was very much an invention of the American upper class in the mid-nineteenth century. It sought to put out the raucousness of the event and prevent additional “Christmas riots”.
Now that another hundred years have gone by, the winter solstice is no longer immediately relevant to modern life and the old form of celebration is well forgotten. Yet America’s economic growth spurt of the twentieth century has consolidated another change: the commemoration of the birth of Christ has become the most significant incentive to go shopping that mankind has ever known. A culture has sprung up where gift-giving (and lots of it) is both a pivotal way to show your love for friends and family as well as a massive influx of fuel to the international money machine2.
Here in China, the youth may give each other small gifts, but there is nothing on the scale of America’s massive shopping spree. Instead, Christmas in China feels like a low-key version of America’s New Year’s Day. People use it as an reason to go do something fun, to whatever extent is within their means.
On Christmas eve for example, my high school students have a regular day of classes and then arrange for parties to be held in each classroom in the evening. A wealthier friend of mine goes out with her family to a karaoke restaurant, where they can spend the whole night eating, drinking and singing. Chinese may or may not know something about Jesus, but generally, their Christmas has nothing to do with Christ.
A faithful Christian may be saddened by all this, and sincerely protest that Jesus is supposed to be at the center of Christmas. Yet, since Jesus’s birth was actually put into this holiday long after it was established, is it wrong for other cultures to take him out of it again? Indeed—how might Jesus have celebrated his own birthday, and how would he have asked us to celebrate it today?
1 From the “History Channel” web-feature devoted to Christmas.
2 See also this article on the history of Christmas (archived at Looksmart.com’s “Find Articles”
, with a specific reference to the “Christmas economy.”
China • Way of Life • Religion • (41) Trackbacks • Permalink
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Worth a Thousand Happy Romances
Many people have advice for me about love. Another teacher who works in my school confided in me one day, telling me how she loved a young man in high school once, but since there was so much pressure for her to focus on her studies, she said nothing to him about her feelings. Later on, she married a different man, and buried in her heart a question that has stayed alive all these years, always asking her what would have happened if she had told that young man about her feelings while she had the chance. She urged me to follow my heart, and when I love a woman, to let her know that I love her.
I confessed to my friend that this might not be a good time for me to talk about my own love story. The last time I actually sat down and told someone any details of my love stories over the last two years, I discovered hot coals of anger hiding in those memories, and the very act of breathing my tale flamed them into a small rage, furious with God for allowing such a string of bad luck to have come to pass. In some cases, my luck has been so bad, so tinged with irony and impossible coincidences, that it seems it could only have happened with the hand of heaven controlling it behind the scenes, purposefully arranging for David’s heart to be crushed several times in a row.
Now this is the part where my good friends tell me, “now David, don’t be so pessimistic. Those girls were not right for you. Surely there’s someone out there, and God just is helping you get ready for her.”
I appreciate their sentiments, and I want to believe them, but then I look around at the world and I wonder: 9 times out of 10, I see people married to someone they are not in love with, often still in love with someone they are not married to. Human lives overflow with regret.
Now the statistician in me gets to work, and starts calculating the odds that David Bowers, resident of Wuxi, China and author of the Brightwind website, will ever meet that mystery Miss Wonderful. He doesn’t think long before looking at me in the mirror over the rims of his glasses and saying, “Don’t get your hopes up.”
“You’d better get used to just being yourself” that face in the mirror tells me, “because you can never guarantee that any other person will ever make you happy.”
Yet good possibilities are always there, waiting in little bubbles to just pop over your head and drop something wonderful into your life. Every day, beautiful things happen, little miracles with heavenly signatures all over them, and yet many conveniently ignore them in determined self-pity.
But that’s where those impossible coincidences come in. You can see heavenly signatures on the bad things as well as the good when you realize how far most things are out of your control. Limitations are part of the very fabric we are made of, like a ray of light which can go on forever in one direction, but never in two at once.
To realize this is to admit that the joy of life is not in the happily-ever-after fairy tale we’ve been taught to believe. We so often expect that some great event or accomplishment will “make us truly happy” only to realize that we are still the same person after the big day has come and gone.
Some things don’t really matter then: perhaps you are reading this article as a happily married person, or perhaps you are struggling through every day of your marriage just to keep on going. Perhaps you have just fallen deeply in love with someone, or perhaps you have just been deeply hurt. Either way, you are yourself, and the one person that can never go away is you.
Our little rays of light speeding through the dark vacuum of time are limited in every way but one: straight ahead. Our bodies will eventually fall apart just as they were gradually put together, yet we will not fall apart with them. These rays of light, which we are, cannot be divided into pieces, analyzed or decomposed.
Indeed, we can only shine brighter, and we will always find our greatest joy in shining, as brilliantly as the sun, on whoever we are given to shine upon. A single act of genuine kindness is worth a thousand happy romances.
What do you think? If you have something to say on the subject (and I imagine you do), please leave a comment below.
David's Life • Love • Way of Life • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Friday, December 05, 2003
No Words to Describe It.
Although I majored in religious studies in College, I found that the most spiritually inspiring class was Astronomy 101: Stars, Galaxies and Cosmology. Each class was a slide show of the most beautiful photography available to the human race, and each picture dared us to believe that such massive and beautiful things could exist.
Possibly the best-known astronomer in America was Carl Sagan. He crafted words which brought the universe down to the earth for anyone to understand. Through him, the vast complexity of the heavens seemed at once awesome and intimate. His sensitivity to the beauty of the universe had a very spiritual quality. It moved him in his soul, and he was able to make it move others the same way.
In the film Contact, based on Sagan’s novel of the same name, Jodie Foster’s lead character is able to go out and meet the universe on humanity’s behalf. There is a moment in which we watch her as her watery eyes gaze into the stars, and she exclaims in a shocked breath, “Some celestial event… no… no words to describe it!... Poetry!... They should have sent a poet! So beautiful!... beautiful!.... I had no idea!”
Until now, I have found only one artist whose portrayal of the stars—indeed, with no words to describe them—adequately reflects the wonder of Carl Sagan’s vision. His work is so astounding that it makes me wonder: perhaps they should have sent a painter.
Greg Martin depicts planets colliding with one another, stars peeking out from behind the worlds, and nebulas erupting with color. He confronts you with the beauty of a world’s destruction, and seems to stop time at sudden moments of light in the ageless darkness of the universe.
Both Carl Sagan and Greg Martin have been able to see the human spirit reflected in the sky. Each burst of light is at once the brief span of a human life, and all the timeless potential with which it is endowed.
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