I know that I am not alone in this dilemma. Many of us are preoccupied with countless necessities, overlaid by hopes and dreams, by obligations we do not necessarily want to service. There are the times when we are unhappy, dissatisfied with ourselves, or when our ego is kicking us because it is not getting its perceived due.
Seeking to satisfy someone else often causes problems. We wonder, What am I being asked to do? Am I obliged to do this thing? But then I can’t say no to friends, so I’ve got to work this thing out, when really I don’t want to do it. But I am tortured by a certain obligation to my friends, when I should be in a position to say, “I don’t want to do it and I ain’t gonna do it.”
When I watch a television news program by myself, I often become aware that I am being maneuvered. The television has no interest in my well-being. The interest is in keeping me there because they have something to sell me. They don’t say, “Well, you come back any time you want, and we’ll be here and can talk if you like.”
No, they say, “Don’t go away.” And in order to say, “Don’t go away” in the most profound way, the ploy is often: “So-and-so shot somebody, and you’ll want to know about that. Don’t go away.” So you sit there, waiting to see who shot who. That kind of manipulation affects you, because you can’t just sit there and watch without it having some effect on you.
We also have a set of reflexes to certain activities in life. When I am at a dinner table with friends or family, there comes a time, whatever the conversation is wrapped around, when certain portions of the body respond to what I’m thinking, or the direction in which the conversation is going. So if the conversation is beginning, unintentionally, to dance around something that I am involved with, or that I find highly embarrassing or painful or simply don’t want to deal with, certain parts of the body get the message even in the smallest degree, and the shoulders begin to go up a little bit. If somebody asks me a question that I don’t want to answer, or if I don’t know the answer and I don’t want to embarrass myself, the shoulders go up, and sometimes the stomach muscles tighten a little bit. It is then fight or flight.
My experiences as a public speaker have tested this reaction many times, but have also taught me to be prepared with talking points as much as possible, in order to avoid the turmoil that arrives uninvited at the least opportune time or on the most banal occasions.
But even with preparation, it’s a conundrum when it does happen, which is most of the time. And much of the time, in that absence of ease, when I’m in the throes of it—like being thrashed in the undertow in Acapulco—I don’t know how to eliminate it, how to detach myself from it, how to rid myself of it.
Of course, this turmoil that taunts me now has been in me since I was a kid. I have lived with it for some time, as if this was a natural state, in that I have long been drawn to circumstances in my life that create tumult—although it can be a more difficult process to handle at this age, simply because it can wear a person out!
Maybe I put up with turmoil better when I was younger—because I was stronger, more on the go, able to use it and put it to some kind of use. As an actor, for example, or in facing challenges to my survival. Besides, nothing got in my way; I had my focus, I knew where I wanted to go in life, and I was prepared to endure whatever hardships arose, including the turmoil in my intestines.
That said, as I have gotten older, I’ve been increasingly aware that I am more desirous of less turmoil. So I began to think, How can I get rid of this turmoil in myself? It manifests itself internally—first the unease, then the preoccupation with trying to figure it out, adjust, organize, as the head constantly deals with issues and their opposites—until I accept that it’s my nature, I suppose. Now, if I am going to accept that as my nature, I have to have some control over it. And the control I want to have over it is to be able to keep it at a distance when I feel a need to rest myself or to find my focus when more important issues are close at hand.
How do others gain control? Some choose to relinquish it and to rely on their religion and place everything in the hands of that power. Not the priest, not the rabbi, not the preacher in the pulpit, but in the image or the concept of God or Muhammad or Buddha. And that gives them peace. For some it is simply a matter of going to church, and they come away full of the spirit. Things are wonderful, they feel good, and life is great.
But I think many people wrestle with the stress, unclear of a solution. They are troubled; they don’t manage their difficulties well. They’re not easygoing people; they’re uptight, short of patience, easily agitated. In the worst cases, they turn to drugs—prescription or otherwise—or they resort to violence. They have never found that area within themselves where they can be peaceful with who they are, what they are, and where they are.
In my own case, as I began to think about it—as I do about everything—the appearance was that the turmoil inside me is so all-encompassing that its presence implies that I have no counterweight, no compensating balance. And without those, there can be no controlling of the intensity, longevity, or impact of the chaos making me uneasy.
It came to me that I need to be able to create counterweight, counterbalance. How do I do that? By drinking? Should I ingest other kinds of drugs, medicines, or whatever else might calm me internally?
No. As I’ve stated, I know people who have tried that, with disastrous results. Instead, I said, maybe I can create a counterweight inside myself, and the thought of that was intriguing—just the thought of it. Now, what would that be? How do I go about that?
And, son of a gun, bingo! I was struck by the thought of a place I gave a name to before I even began to try to structure it: a neutral zone, a place inside myself where my consciousness, my instincts, and my imagination can be at ease, shut themselves down: where they can rest.
My neutral zone would be a place where I can simply enter at will and be free of all other considerations for as long as I need to be in order to create, or have a sense of self-control and engage my capacity to think, examine, and explore. All of those things could be possible if my internal self were not constantly dealing with the turmoil as if I were unable to control the inflow of all the world’s problems coming at me.
What I would like is to create a neutral zone in which I am totally aware of everything that’s going on around me, yet am able to control my inner flow. I would be able to sit, figuratively, in this neutral zone and just breathe, and be aware that I am breathing, and not think of anything other than what I choose to think about; think as deeply as I wish about whatever I choose, examine it from every conceivable point of view, even examine the opposite of whatever it is. And when I so choose and I feel I have had a requisite amount of time with myself in my neutral zone, I can come out of it, knowing I can go into it and come out of it at will.
Now, what would that do to me? I think that would be just plain wonderful: to have a neutral zone in which—when the trials of life begin to wear you down, when the concerns or obligations or just the pressure of the outside world imposes itself on you through newspapers, television, BlackBerrys, iPods, and cell phones—you would be able to control your head and your sensitive innards to a point where you could order yourself to take it easy, settle down, and just relax.
We do this somewhat naturally in life. At the end of the day, we get weary, and somehow we know, from habit, that we have to go to bed.
So, for myself, and for all of us whose consciousness is constantly in play on all kinds of levels, I propose a zone into which it is possible to just simply float into neutral, and breathe, and not think of anything; to listen to our breathing, see if we can hear, as I’ve tried, our own heartbeat without putting a finger on a wrist or carotid artery. If I concentrate, I can feel my heart beating; I can hear my breath being sucked down into my lungs; I can almost feel my blood moving through my veins.
The health-giving properties have been so promising that I am working now to establish a neutral zone in my insides, using my consciousness as a gateway
to create a place to go into. First of all, my consciousness will help in the creation, as will my instincts and imagination. This would be a place for them to cool it as well, away from the storms of life for a little while.
If I can create this neutral zone at this stage, I think it would strengthen the other side of me. It would strengthen the usage of my mind, strengthen my mental acuity, make sharper my perception, and hone my conceptual grasp on reality. That’s what I would like to do.
Will I be successful at the age of eighty-one? I don’t know, but it’s something I’m going to try. The awareness that you’re alive, and that your mind is free, that your brain is in good shape—that in itself is reward enough; to sit and let your imagination be free to wander, if it so wishes, to sit and empty your mind if you’d like, bringing it to a resting place, with your consciousness wide open—not working, but rather at rest. You’re conscious of other things—everything you see, everything you hear, everything you feel, everything you touch. But you’re not making judgments about what you see, hear, feel, or touch. You are free not to make judgments, and if you are free not to make judgments, I tell myself, it places me in a mode where I am automatically replenishing the strength and vigor of all parts of myself. My heart benefits, my brain benefits, my mind benefits, my consciousness benefits, my imagination benefits, my instincts benefit. And I am free to watch them, one by one, trigger themselves into action because they need to.
I tell you all this, darling Ayele, to perhaps spare you some of what I have endured for far too long. My advice to you is to start to look for your own neutral zone early, for you will in time surely need a place to withdraw to, a place in which you find a period of peace and a replenishing of your vital resources.
You are never too young to start that quest, either, as I have found myself in my neutral zone becoming once again a boy of six, seven, eight, younger or older, sitting on the edge of the rocky bank above the beach on Cat Island, looking off into the distance at the point where the ocean meets the sky—the horizon. As an adult I can say that I have been out that far, and farther, but haven’t gotten there yet, so I am still traveling on, to one day reach that final destination.
seventeenth letter
LOGIC AND REASON
logic: a science that deals with the principles and criteria of validity of inference and demonstration: the science of the formal principles of reasoning.
reason: the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways: intelligence.
—MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S 11TH COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY
Picking up where I left off in my last letter to you, dear Ayele, I hope that you will one day value, as much as I do, the problem-solving mechanisms that helped me, for instance, to establish the concept of the neutral zone.
Those mechanisms I’m talking about are the overlapping processes of logic and reason—which form a system that is inherent in me, as it is in all people, although the level of it varies. My hunch is that in our gene pool, given what I observed in my parents and grandparents, you and I descend from excellent stock when it comes to inherent levels of logic and reason.
The best story to give you as an example takes us back to the early days of my dad’s work as a tomato farmer. With his natural instinct for logic and reason, early on in his efforts to grow tomatoes in the traditional manner, Reggie Poitier made a startling discovery that in and around the caves on Cat Island, the bat dung provided topnotch fertilizer for whatever happened to be growing in the earth around where it collected. Using logic and applying reason, he tried out his theory in small test cases, and sure enough, tomatoes grown in dirt enriched by the dung of bats from the caves were more delicious, more nutritious, more robust, and more plentiful than those grown in unfertilized soil.
But to get an adequate supply of the bat dung from the cave to the tomato fields was a huge problem, since he had no drays—what we called wagons. But in a methodical, reasonable manner, my father found a way. He saved his money, bought a donkey, and eventually bought a horse. He would take croker sacks that he picked up from some store or found on the island and fill them with the bat dung, throw them across the back of his horse or donkey, sometimes on both, and truck them into the forest where he was raising tomatoes. Undaunted by the challenges, my father is a prime illustration of someone who was able to call on whatever level of logic there was in him. And his whole life proceeded in that manner.
Both of my parents exhibited a reasonable way of dealing with life and with other people, which was inherent and developed from their experiences, since neither had much schooling. My mother didn’t have an education; she could barely read and write. I know that my father, who had more of an education than my mother, himself could barely read and write. They didn’t know about the world as I know about the world. They didn’t learn in the schools that they attended—for a very short time, obviously—that there was a world outside the primitive island upon which they lived. They heard there was an England, because we were the subjects of a colonial possession of the English, but we knew little of England, except for that song that they, like me, were taught in school to sing:
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!
That was pounded into us.
Logic and reason grow out of the experience of interacting with the world, with daily life, out of the instinct for the recognition of logic and reason in oneself, and out of the feeling that logic and reason need to and should be applied in one’s best interest. In the part of the world where I came from, most people without an education didn’t know what the word logic meant. Reason is another such word. The majority of people on Cat Island couldn’t give you a definition of either. The two words, and all that sits behind those two words, were totally unknown to so many people in my life.
Nonetheless, survival requires the use of logic and reason. Reginald Poitier proves that. My dad had a difficult life, and I suspect that it was his lot to have a tough life. But a tough life did not mean that he didn’t have a requisite amount of logic in his system, in his sense of how he looked at the world and dealt with it. He was just destined to have a difficult life. Physically it was difficult; economically it was difficult, that struggle to do the difficult things that he needed to do to feed his family. But his was a remarkable life in spite of, perhaps because of, the fact that it was a difficult life.
Difficulty surely has nothing to do with one’s ability to make fairly good use of such logic as one has in one’s system. Now, ultimately that sense of logic, that sense of reason, came through the bloodline. But the fact is, things that pass through the bloodline don’t necessarily surface in the following generation. (This is my own reasoning, by the way.) It doesn’t follow that the members of every generation are going to have this wonderful quality of logic and wonderful understanding of reason instinctively even though they don’t know what the words mean and they won’t learn about them until later in life, if they ever do.
As a result of these qualities not being passed from generation to generation, like eye color and other things, they travel through the blood unexpressed, remaining intact, and suddenly surface in an individual in the second or third or fourth generation, regardless of that individual’s external circumstances, regardless of the society in which he or she lives, regardless of economic disposition, regardless of the educational process that is available, regardless of what the parents had no knowledge of.
Up comes this person, and logic and reason flower in them, and they are able to extrapolate in ways that most people don’t. Something tells them when something is not quite right. They’ll say, “No, I don’t know if that’s right.” What tells them that? They know that if you take this fact and that fact and marry them with something else, the result will be a reasonable outcome. Many people don’t get that passed on to them, that “reasonable outcome” instinct.
I think that some of what was passed on to me by my parent
s actually surfaced in them. It didn’t change their lives; they still had a very tough life. But what passed on to me through them will I hope find fertile ground in the onward journey of my children, their children, and my great-grandchildren—among whom you are the first.
What made me destined or fortunate to be the recipient, I don’t know. What was passed on has been enhanced by the life that I’ve lived, although that was just the polishing of it, or the nurturing of it. But as to its origins, my theory is, applying logic and reason, that there is this force—you’ve heard me speak of it, Ayele, as you’ve read my letters to you so far—of such extraordinary disposition that it created the world, the universe, or it influences and controls it. Yet it is not something that you could describe by saying, “Oh, here is a piece of that,” or “Here is what it looks like. Here is a physical manifestation of a portion of that force.” No, it’s intangible. It is all unto itself; you cannot hold it, push it, or turn it or twist it or pull it: you are subject to it. The force has that influence over your life, and it might have a need for you and your life in its own existence. Its existence might very well say, “I need this kid. This kid is important for us, and this is what he will do for us.” You’re destined right there.
We don’t know that this doesn’t happen, and because we have no proof that it doesn’t happen, I am inclined to say: give me a good reason why it doesn’t exist.
Many people die before they are ten years old, and maybe that force was very much in that person who died before age ten. But that person was destined to die at ten. He or she wouldn’t live to be sixty or seventy. But because the child will die at ten doesn’t mean that the child isn’t carrying a wonderful amount of that force. But the force isn’t concerned about the age of the child. That force doesn’t have the same concern for what we term “the sanctity of life.” The “sanctity of life” for us grows out of fear, the fear that maybe we won’t live a long life. Most people in the old days died in their twenties or thirties or forties. And fifty was old age. Longevity, as we know it, is an evolutionary thing.
Life Beyond Measure Page 19
