With a Capital L
I remember about eight years ago standing on top of the highest cliff above the river west of Masterton. The water was clear blue at the edges and black and deep beneath me. My friends were watching from below. No one had tried the jump yet. All I had to do was start running and I’d be committed to the dive—and it would have to be a run, to clear those rocks. I remember hesitating minute after minute after minute. It’s such a long, long way down. Decisions and revisions. I’m pretty sure I’ll make it all right, the hard part is just to start that run. Now I’m going to ... no wait, I better check once more that there’s nothing in the way down there. This time! Somehow I’m over the cliff and down and down and wet and my legs are on fire and it’s done, and I’m alive, and now I know it.
That was a peak moment. They’re gifts that come along every once in a while. I want to live in the light of those moments. Old people often tell you how short life is, and how precious. I’ve resolved to take that seriously, to live as if time were short. But it’s a battle. There is a crust or a scab that forms, and I settle into the rhythm of my days and ways. A week, two weeks, a month has gone by and I might as well have slept through the lot. My boss tells me that poetry is there to point us at what he calls holy moments, those moments that make life worth getting out of bed for in the morning.
I don’t want to give the impression that this pursuit is a feverish thing. It is true that some weeks busyness does push down on me, and the weight of a thousand other jobs keeps me from attending to any one task wholeheartedly. People become irritating interruptions, disrupting my workflow. But that cramming in isn’t life with a capital L either. It’s something to be resisted.
I want to press my face up to the world and taste what’s there to be tasted. I want to look past the social veneer, at least occasionally, and see the people around me for what they really are: infinitely unlikely wonders all swimming in a miracle sea.
Rabbi Simcha Bunam said, “Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: ‘For my sake was the world created,’ and in his left: ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ ”