Anam Cara

There is great wisdom in the mystical tradition and in the Catholic tradition, and the Catholic tradition always recognized that the contemplatives need ritual to make their way through the deserts of solitude. If you sit down in an armchair by the fire and you allow the days, like big empty gray rooms, to come around your head, you will turn and feed on your own negativity. Contemplatives survive because the day is divided into times of praise, prayer, ritual, and in order to survive solitude one needs ritual. There is really no kind of education for getting old. You get old, you begin to lose your power, suddenly you find that you are left with it, you are on your own with it, and no one sees it like you do. There is so much that could be done to make people aware of the possibilities that are in old age. Old age, like illness, is a time when you really need to mind yourself. If you get hooked on some of the down-pulls of gravity in your soul, it can be a time of torture so that you pray for release—to die would be total peace. If you look on it as a time of possibility, amazing things can happen. A good axiom in life is to try to see the possibilities in a situation. Often in a situation, it is the walls we see, it is the door where the key has been thrown away that we see, and we never see the windows of possibilities and the places where thoughts and feelings can grow. In old age there is a lot more time, and freedom comes with that. In old age one can totally reorient one’s life and find fascinating companionship with one’s own soul.

How we view the future actually shapes that future. Time isn’t like space at all. When you think of space, you think of Connemara with the mountains stretching out with no walls at all, and if you look at Clare you see the little fields and the space stretching out towards the mountains and towards the ocean. We falsely think that time is like that too. You walk through the field of today and then you cross over to the field of tomorrow and then to the field of the day after that. But it’s not like that. Time comes towards us unshapen, predominantly, and it is our expectation that shapes the time that is coming. So expectation creates the future. If you bring creative expectation to your future, no matter what difficulty may lie in wait for you, you will be able somehow to transfigure it. Whereas if you bring really negative expectation to your future, you will turn yourself totally into a tower of misery. It is amazing actually, when people are in limit threshold situations, the resources they can call on which they would have never been aware of until it really gets very difficult. Nuair a thagann an crú ar an tairne, as they say in Connemara—when the pressure comes on you. There’s great wisdom in perspective and distance. It is usually when we are myopic and close up to a thing and we can’t see its contour at all, that it totally imprisons and controls us. Whereas sometimes when you step back, you get another view, and you pick up a way of relating to the event or the situation which frees you predominantly.

One of the most beautiful films I have ever seen is a film by the Japanese director Kurosawa. It’s called Dersu Uzala, and it is told about a platoon of Russian soldiers who go in to map an area of Outer Mongolia. The leader of the troop is a very elegant, dignified, intellectual man, and he comes across an old Mongolian man who is very wise. An amazing friendship builds between the two men, which is a classical theme in literature—the mentor and the disciple—and they get very close. The young man is learning so much from the older man and they deepen this amazing spiritual friendship, but what the young man doesn’t realize is that his passion, his sense of life, his curiosity are enabling the old man to prepare for his dying. There is one famous moment in the film when the old man suddenly sees a tiger, and it is a moment of pure dark epiphany. You know in that moment that he knows he is going to die, and the rest of the film just fills out the moment. It is an amazing film about a way of ritualizing one’s leave-taking of the world—with dignity, with courage, with great peacefulness, and as well with a sense of what you are actually leaving behind to those that you love.

TEMPERAMENT, NOT TIME