Adventures in Going Nowhere

Three poems pop into my mind all the time:

Dickinson's "I dwell in Possibility"
Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
and Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese."

To those of us who travel, who have access to more information in a single day than Emily might have encountered in years, we can barely imagine dwelling in one house for an entire lifetime, rarely going anywhere, yet "dwelling in Possibility."  While her possibilities were smaller in the outside world than ours, she had a vivid inner life and an expansive mind to travel in.

The speaker in Frost's poem looks and looks down one road, then the other, making his choice about which road to take.  He chooses the one "less traveled."  The title suggests that the road he didn't ' take always haunted him a little.  Was one road really less traveled?  What might have made all the difference in the one he chose? Reflecting on what his older self might say about his young-man choice, he guesses that, really, both roads are "about the same."

Mary Oliver opens "Wild Geese" with the startling assertion: "You do not have to be good."  This statement flies in the face of everything we learned in childhood and beyond: You have to be good for goodness sake, and not only morally and behaviorally but good at everything you do. But no, Oliver says, we don't always have to be good for or at anything. What a revelation!

I read a small book by Pico Iyer this weekend (The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere)--a book that touches on his friendship with Leonard Cohen who spent decades in a monastery: meditating, cleaning, and taking care of one of his senior abbots who lived to be 106. Cohen describes these as the happiest years of his life.  After years of reflection (and occasional drives to McDonalds), Leonard Cohen returned to performing.

Iyer muses on why his album, Old Ideas, written when he was 77, was a best-seller in so many countries and why his concerts were packed. 

"Why were people across the planet reaching out for such a funereal album...? Maybe they were finding a clarity and wisdom in the words of someone who'd gone nowhere, sitting still to look at the truth of the world and himself that they didn't get from many recording artists?  Cohen seemed to be ...talking to us, as the best friends do, without varnish or evasion or design."

"And why were so many hastening to concerts delivered by a monk in his late seventies? Perhaps they longed to be taken back to a place of trust--which is what Nowhere is, at heart--where they could speak and listen with something deeper than their social selves and be returned to penetrating intimacy."

"In an age of speed, nothing can be more invigorating than going slow."

"In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention."

Poets and philosophers push into the cracks of conventional thinking. They sometimes contradict each other and themselves. These kinds of truth are not so much answers but echoes of the kinds of questions we're all asking, questions that poke holes in what we're certain about.