The Non Bucket List

by Tom Mallouk

From time to time over the last several years my wife, Eileen, will suggest we make a list of all the things we want to do in whatever time remains for us. When I have no response she might explain that at our age we can still travel freely and that will not always be the case. Even with that prompting, I still draw a blank.

My lack of response is not a function of denial. It's not that Eileen is more aware of the passage of time than me though she has a better grasp of the practicalities involved. It's that I am not oriented to the “what” of our lives as much as the “how.” So when she asked about the things I feel I must do or places I want to see, there was nothing for me to report. I knew if I never went to Italy, played a special golf course, ate at a fabulous restaurant or enjoyed any number of delightful things and remarkable places, I would have no regrets. And I knew Eileen might, given that her ambitions run in the direction of the “what” of this life. Eileen has a bucket list of places to travel and things to do and I get to be the lucky one who accompanies her.

So when she asked about a list of things with the intimation that our time on the planet was growing short, what occurred to me is that I want to confront my inevitable decline and death with more equanimity than I have lived the rest of my life.

It put me in mind of Mary Oliver's wonderful poem, "When Death Comes." Ever since I had a very harrowing encounter with my own mortality when I was 20 — an encounter that was largely a function of my recklessness and predisposition to shame — I have tried to live my life with a kind existential integrity.

By that I mean to live with the awareness that each day might be my last and is a gift to be cherished, that in some hard to articulate way I should allow myself to be guided by the imminence of death in my life. I wrote "Every Day" 32 years after my initial encounter with death and for me it is a kind anthem.

Every Day

Every day death is with me,

a very personal kind of god.

It walks along side me.

Sometimes it frames a particular image,

a solitary tree against the dark backdrop of

Buckingham mountain.

At other times it makes exquisite

the sweet burst on my tongue

of a freshly peeled and sectioned orange.

But most often it massages my mind,

silently sculpting my day.

When I sleep, and especially at night

it lies beneath me. As I drift off

it shapes itself seamlessly to the contours

of my body and pours itself in.

Each day I awake closer and less and more afraid.

Each day it takes me by the hand and steadies me

until I can stand and points me on my way.

*I mean to live with the awareness that each day might be my last and is a gift to be cherished.*

But there is another aspect that doesn't fit into this notion of existential integrity. I'll call it faith until I can find a better word. It's the sense that what I do and indeed what each of us does makes a difference at a level beyond, deeper or just different than what is apparent. It is a sense that there is a compassionate presence that both looks over and permeates day-to-day life, encouraging each of us to continue to struggle to make sense of our ineffable existence, to continue to try to discern the right way to behave and to have the courage to risk heartbreak for the promise of love.

How these themes are concretized in each life may be very different but the bias of this compassionate presence is that we embrace the challenge of meaning, discern and enact the right thing to do and choose love over isolation. To be in touch with and guided by this spirit is to be buoyed by a profound reassurance that says "everything will be all right, your wounds will be healed, your injuries will one day give you character and even your enemies will find something to love in you and you in them.”

I believe it was Robert Bly in referencing the Native American idea of the soul who said “The soul is where the inner and the outer meet and all the points along that continuum.” To this way of thinking a child has a very small soul and the boundary between the inner and the outer world is thick and impermeable. Everything centers in a necessary and good way around the infant and its needs. As the child develops, the famous egocentricity of childhood emerges to be slowly worn down by experience. In this way a life lived fully engaged in the world with awareness grows the soul. I think of it as an expanding membrane that becomes progressively more permeable. As we age the “I” becomes smaller and the world becomes bigger. The membrane between the diminishing corporeal self and the spiritual thins out and the divine becomes more accessible.

“The soul is where the inner and the outer meet and all the points along that continuum.”

To be connected to the world in this way invites a spiritual awareness that infuses life with an underlying optimism as if there is a floor below which your spirit will not fall, that even when you are most in despair, something will hold you up. It is a spirit that says you do not have to be afraid of death. It is not a guarantee of an afterlife but it intimates that your personal consciousness is just a temporary vehicle for perceiving and understanding existence. It suggests there is a larger consciousness that incorporates the personal that we can partake of in this life, even though we will likely lose our personal awareness of it after death.

There are times when I am largely unaware of this compassionate presence and I can feel and act in the resentful, petty and argumentative way we seem to find so entertaining on reality TV. Is it possible that we are drawn to this kind of entertainment because we find something reassuring about watching other people behave as badly as we sometimes do?

But life keeps bringing me back to this deeper awareness as much as I sometimes struggle to avoid it. Even though I know better, I avoid it because there is no way that I know of to stay connected to this spiritual dimension without an ongoing awareness of death, and not of death as some abstraction or simple fact of life but as my personal death, the death that will only be mine. As palpable and real as the sense of the transcendent, compassionate and comforting presence can be for me, I still want desperately to hold on to this life and the deeply sensual and worldly joy, sadness and pleasure possible within it. Pain I can do without!

*To be connected to the world in this way invites a spiritual awareness that infuses life with an underlying optimism.*

The irony is that joy and beauty are more so because of the awareness of death. Impermanence frames all of our experiences and that frame seems to compress things. The awareness of death acts as a kind of magnifier or intensifier that renders a pleasant experience joyful. It draws us more deeply into experience where a blade of grass reveals colors not otherwise apparent and dew on the grass is a prism through which we perceive life’s magnificence.

To experience things in this way requires close attention and it is the quality of that attention that I wish to understand. When I have achieved this state of attention (or simply found myself in it), I become smaller, the world bigger. There is a sense of surrender to the world and the things in it as I restrain my inclination to put my very personal stamp on what is observed. Of course it is me doing the observing and attending but it is a much less ego driven version of myself. There is momentary freedom from the encumbrances of my personality that delivers the world to me in a way that invites respect for, reverence of and delight in what I find there.

I tried to write about the experience of being relieved of the encumbrances of my personality in the poem "My Joy."

My Joy

Last winter in the dark and tired

of the short day I searched the house

for all the photographs of myself.

There were not many. Though my wife

chronicles most of our life in prints, there

are hardly any of me without her or the kids.

A short walk from the back porch

at the edge of the field is a fifty-gallon drum

with holes punched in the side for burning.

Brittle grass gave way against

frozen ground. The crunch of my steps

crept from beneath my boots.

Dark against the backdrop of leafless trees,

the mouth of the smoldering drum belched

heat shimmers to the leaden sky.

Its acrid breath seared my face and I

placed one, then another and another one

in the white ash and watched my smiling self

curl at the corners, catch crinkling into flame.

There is momentary freedom from the encumbrances of my personality that delivers the world to me in a way that invites respect for, reverence of and delight in what I find there.

What this form of attention has revealed to me is a strong, almost visceral, sense of how all things are connected. It is not lost on me that when we allow it to suffuse our experience, love also produces this sense. But this requires loosening our attachment to the specificity of our love. I can love my children, and I do fiercely and, I hope, not possessively. At its best that love should open me to the love of all children and further to the love of all people who were, after all, once children and then to all living things. In this way love connects us to all things and all things to each other.

The felt experience of this interconnectedness, what I referred to earlier as a larger consciousness, allows us to experience the divine in day to day life. Indeed it is through the mundane that we gain access to the divine. The mechanism of this access is close attention.

When I have been able to experience things in this way, it seems self-evident that some greater intelligence is at work. The more I have been able to quiet the chatter of my ego driven need, the more the deeply interconnected world becomes apparent. In the trajectory of my life my desire to understand burns as brightly as ever but it seems like things do indeed make more and more sense. And that parallels the progress of human understanding revealed by science. I know more and more and we know more and we are learning it more rapidly all the time. It is one of the ironies of this greater understanding that the more rapidly we come to know things, the more rapidly the unknown expands. So we are getting closer to understanding and further away at the same time. But what remains, at least in my experience, is the awareness that things ultimately make sense and that I get to take part in discerning and, in some small way, creating that sense.

As I have aged the world has gotten bigger while I have gotten smaller. Things seem to make more and more sense as my need to define them or pin them down has abated. Of course, I could be deluding myself and this entire description could be a function of some ego driven ambition. But I can say unequivocally that the more I have been able to pay attention in the way I've described, the more benign the world seems to me and the more I find myself suffused with compassion. I can't imagine that is a bad thing.

What I bring to the final third of my life because of these musings is hope that I will encounter my diminishment and death with a dignity befitting a person of faith. Although I no longer practice religiously (I was raised Catholic), my experience gives me faith in the sense, the truly larger sense, my life and all of our lives make. I hope that faith continues to comfort me on my way.

Dr. Tom Mallouk is a poet, essayist and for the past 47 years a practicing psychotherapist. He has been widely published both in print and online. The three time runner-up for the Bucks County Pennsylvania poet laureate award, his chapbook Nantucket Revisited was published in 2013. For the past few years he has been integrating the process of trauma resolution with the process of creating poetry. This fall he will be presenting the workshop “Poetry and Repair“ at the Caesura Poetry Festival which will be a virtual event utilizing Zoom.

Sarah FengJuly 25, 2020humans, culture, life, poetry, reflection