№ 691. How long will you live?

Performance Excellence Network

 

By Susan Ople

The average life span of a cockroach is one year. But, a cockroach does not know this. It does not scurry into safety at the sight of a giant shoe looming overhead, waiting for the perfect moment to squash it to extinction.

You and I differ from a cockroach. We are born knowing that eventually we will die. Like bread crumbs to pudding, our ashes will comingle with the Earth, thus offering nutrients to earthworms. An earthworm is far luckier than a cockroach. Its life span varies widely, from six to nine years, with the luckier species able to survive for at least 20 years.

That we, humans, are gifted with the knowledge that our umbilical cords come with an expiration date appear to be lost on people who live aimless lives. To wake up each morning and feel that this day is no different than the other is such a grievous error in judgment. Every sunrise is an opportunity to live a day better and more productive than the previous one.

№ 690. Kindness

 

№ 689. Lonely Planets & Happy Feet

We’re most transported when we’re least distracted. And we’re most at peace – ready to be transformed, in fact – when most deeply absorbed. I’d much rather converse with one sight for 60 minutes than 60 places for one minute each. When I travel with the Dalai Lama – as I’ve done for 10 recent Novembers across Japan – I’m convinced that the wide-awake responsiveness he brings to every last convenience store and passing toddler is partly the result of the three hours he spends at the beginning of every day in meditation. Destinations can only be as rich as what we bring to them.

During this new season of the virus, I’ve been spending many happy hours on the tiny sunlit terrace outside my apartment in Nara, Japan, with the poet laureate of lockdowns, Marcel Proust. I think of him also as the patron saint of travellers, precisely because he was confined by severe asthma to spending three years alone in his cork-lined bedroom. What allowed him to read with such acuity the small print of every crowded soiree? To recall with such fresh immediacy a long-ago gaggle of young beauties on a beach? To record with wakeful precision the sight of a loved one asleep? That time in solitary, I suspect. It was Proust, I never forget, who reminded us that the point of every trip is not new sights but new eyes. Once we have those, even the old sights are reborn.

 

№ 688. Miroirs / Mirrors

Gibet Gaspard-Nuit

 

For some, that sense of containment makes Ravel easier to appreciate than to love. Yet he inspires adoration as well as admiration. Why? I think the containment is key. From the outside, Ravel appears small, self-contained, even buttoned-up. But anyone who has a heart can see that he is bigger on the inside. There is anguish within the Passacaille of the Piano Trio, mystery in the Miroirs, endless tenderness in the adagio of the second Piano Concerto, with its “mile upon silver mile” of melody. There is vivacity in the Violin Sonata, innocent wonder in Mother Goose. Nature is writ large in Daphnis and Chloe; in Histoires naturelles, human nature is writ small. These are intimations of the ineffable, not expressions of it. You don’t need to look behind the mask to feel them; look at it.