From "Himalayan Diary"
5/22/13
I like the term “lose your soul” for the way it implies that one’s most essential being is both precious and something you yourself can destroy.
Of course, the truth is that, short of death, one can never “lose” one’s being but one can change it into something less or more precious.
My being—essential or otherwise—seems especially precious to me this clear, cold morning at this camp in the Himalayas near the borders of Kashmir and Tibet, after a day during which I believed myself close to death many, many times.
Eight hours driving along the edges of precipices with nothing but cement blocks, rusting oil drums or, often, only the crumbling edge of a one-and-a-half lane two-way road to preserve us from plummeting a thousand feet into a rushing river.
Down the gravel slopes I could see cars so devastated by their falls that they looked like shredded tin foil, and in one village I saw a van that had been transformed into a crater of metal junk by a falling boulder.
We often had to drive around boulders, some the size of armchairs, others as big as houses.
Yet Indian families traveled these roads as happily as American families might trundle off to Cape Cod.
I am prepared to admit that I am neurotic.
But still I was abjectly terrified for hours on end.
And so, at this moment, my life now and all the thoroughly ordinary things I have to look forward to seem a sort of blessing.
But is my “soul” this life of “ordinary things” that now seems so precious?
In the Christian tradition the most essential part of one’s life is almost always understood to be one’s moral being, or virtue.
Too lose one’s soul is to cease to be virtuous, profoundly, within the depths of one’s being.
What actually is precious about the soul-as-moral-being?
Or what exactly is it about leading a life in accordance with one’s morality that might be described as precious?
Simplicity?
The sense that what you are inside is the same as what you are outside, that you actually are the being you wish to represent yourself as to the world.
There have been periods of my life when I have felt, despite all my limits, confusions and weaknesses, that I am, morally speaking, more or less the person I want to be.
And there were still other times when I wanted to be a person who did things I could not justify morally.
And I became that person.
Or I became divided into two people: who I seemed to be and who I actually was.
Mostly I am thinking of one particular time, during which I felt a great deal of pain, and caused a great deal of pain, and yet never felt more completely alive.
There is a joy that comes from being in harmony with one’s own beliefs, and a joy that comes from abandoning that harmony.
Though there are limits to how much disharmony—or discord—one can experience and still feel one is living a life one wants to recognize as one’s own.
A limit to the intersection of discord and joy.
Maybe what I’m talking about is the kind of joy one feels when a jazz soloist departs from the melody, or even from the idea of music as we generally understand it.
A joyful crossing over into chaos and noise.
The joy of human freedom.
Which may be the same thing as the joy of doing what is forbidden.
All my life, my first response on being forbidden to do something has been a fierce ache to do that very thing, and my first impulse on being required to do something has been a fierce desire to do the opposite.
Our spirits rise as a jazz musician goes into a solo, but at the same time we are always waiting for the solo to end.
For our return to the comfort of the melody, or for the quiet joy of the melody’s simply being there to return to.
Continuity. Reliability. Refuge. The known world.
Even as our transgressions feel as if they are life itself, we are always longing for a return to that harmony of one’s life (or soul) and one’s belief about what one’s life is or ought to be.
And sometimes our return to that harmony brings us more joy than our discordant sojourn did, but not always.
It is a mistake to think we have a single, internally (and eternally) harmonious self, just as it is a mistake to think there is harmony between all good things.
There have been times when the very traits I had once thought virtues came to seem weaknesses.
The virtue of loyalty, for example. Or tolerance. Or the capacity to love.
Sometimes there can be no return to harmony.
The improvisation is almost always smarter, more thrilling and less sentimental than the melody it is based upon.
And so sometimes the joy we feel is not merely at the exercise of freedom, but at the discovery of a better self.
Or a self that possesses virtues different from those of that self we have grown used to thinking of as our own, that self we present to the world, or that we—or the world—designate as “real.”
And so sometimes the desire to reestablish the harmony between the self one actually lives and the self one wants to present to the world yields far more pain than joy.
Pain that can last a lifetime.
Sometimes simplicity is precious and sometimes it is a lie.
Sometimes the life in harmony with what we believe is a betrayal of who we are.
Maybe what is most precious is simply the fact that I am breathing this clear, cold air, that I am in this valley beside this loud, racing, silt-paled river, watching bronze sunbeams tip over jagged, snow-laced peaks to light the mountainside just in front of me, and that this is all so extraordinarily vivid, vital and beautiful.
Maybe my simple being is the primary good and precious thing.
Maybe my moral being is only precious insofar as it enables me to be more completely in this world as it actually is.
Certainly one’s morality ought to be consistent with the world as it actually is—or the human part of the world, since morality concerns only the effects we have upon each other.
So does this mean that my soul—my “most essential being”—is actually the part of me that breathes, sees, hears, feels, loves, loathes, thinks, wants, fears and hopes?
Is that a “part” of me, or “the whole”?
But still, there is something precious about being in harmony with the people in one’s life—though such harmony is not necessarily the same as living in harmony with one’s morals.
How often in human history have people avoided recognizing an evil in their midst so that they might live in harmony with their neighbors?
Discord: Middle English: from Old French descord (noun), descorder (verb), from Latin discordare, from discors ‘discordant,’ from dis- (expressing negation, reversal) + cor, cord- ‘heart.’