One way to lose a desirable spontaneity is to imagine that we know something, anything whatsoever, about the future. I’ve always been susceptible to slippery slopes—assumptions about what will happen based on some one thing that has just happened or is about to happen in the immediate present. In my professional life this meant that I would sometimes resist a particular administrative change because I foresaw, after the unfolding of all its consequences over a certain period of time, the end of the English department. In my parents’ time slippery slopes were everywhere: the conviction that the use of marijuana, or long hair on males, or free love, or gay love, among their children would lead inevitably to the end of western civilization. In my handling of my stubborn adolescent dog Pico it manifests in my ready-made belief that his given moment of bad behaviour on a given morning revealed not only everything that he would do for the rest of that day, and then that week, but also a longer line of development he was on that would make it impossible for us to keep him, an idea that traumatized me. In every case it means: that step you are about to take is actually your first step down a steep slope you can’t even see, and because the steepness is slippery too, you won’t be able to stop yourself from plunging all the way to the bottom of that abyss if you take that first wrong step. Of course in such a vision of choice, and of time, all spontaneity of action, all freedom of direction, is terrifying.
But my dog has also taught me the foolishness of such claims. What he is doing now is never a guide to what he will do in five minutes, much less in an hour or later today. It might be truer of humans, but dogs have a supreme ability to “shake off” the present mood and move into the next moment freely. When I can emulate his spontaneity of mood, forgetting quickly what he just did and waiting happily for what he’ll do next, he and I get along very well, and I find myself happier, easier. There is no telling the future from his present. Unless, of course, by overreacting to his present mood I force a negative future upon us both, so that our mutual levels of stress, instead of dissipating, simply build up. We can create slippery slopes if we wish to.
Not all slippery slope arguments are false, of course. Actions do have consequences. There are right and wrong actions. We do partly make our own futures. As I look around today I wonder if western civilization isn’t indeed coming to an end (but is it because of long hair on men sixty years ago?). These are tempting ways to imagine time and consequence, because on an unconscious level perhaps we prefer an apocalyptic “knowledge” of the future to none at all.
When I find a happy meditation, as I did this morning, it is always helping me to perceive one truth, though others may arise as well: that anything we think we know about the future, anything we think we can do to control the future, any sense we have of the necessary consequence of this moment in the unfolding future—these are the real illusions we cling to of the world around us. When meditation leads me into a sense of being outside time—or so deeply inside the present as to find the concept of time negligible—I understand the foolishness of my reflex belief in slippery slopes.
I recently asked a friend, “how do cheerful people do it?” His answer was, they compartmentalize. I agree, and I suspect they compartmentalize (among other experiences) the present and the future. Well-being and calm arise when we live in the present moment without presuming it to lead mechanically to any particular outcome. Remarkably, instead of this next step taking me down a slope I can’t perceive, I can shake it off, like Pico; so that each step is in a new direction, and its consequences are not determined. If we are to move spontaneously, to walk freely, we have to stop imagining that we know where everything is going.
Any why should each step not equally be a step upward, on a gentle slope needing no great effort to ascend?
21 December, 2024.