I read these lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses from time to time — they always make me laugh:
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
That is so not me. I can happily stay in my apartment for days and still feel a sense of adventure. I’m with Marcel Proust:
The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
It reminds me of the Zen Buddhist idea of “shoshin,” meaning to approach situations with openness, eagerness, and a lack of preconceptions. That may subconsciously be where the first line of my mantra came from:
Stay curious and open to life.
Anyway, for me it’s an important part of enjoying my second childhood.
In The Summer Day Mary Oliver asks,
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
I don’t (thanks to ideas, books, and the internet) even need to leave my apartment to pay attention and open myself up to life.
January 18, 2025
