Award winner in the 2012 MMS Creative Writing Exposition
By Ronald Pies MD
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
--Stanley Kunitz, King of the River
So now the woods have opened up a bit, even as they have darkened, and I am just past my sixtieth year. Wisdom gained? It's hard to say. Looking back at my teenage and college years, I can see that I've let go of some of my youthful grandiosity and sense of entitlement-the demon-sprite that told me I'd certainly win the Nobel Prize in science, a second one in literature, and maybe cure cancer along the way. Sometimes I miss that demon, though, and I wonder if the "realistic" expectations of my later years are really a kind of surrender-settling into old age, rather than raging against its limitations.
In my sixth decade, intimations of mortality are never far from me, and I can now read Robert Frost's deeply-felt poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," with an understanding I never had in my college literature course:
Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
I was raised in the Jewish faith, but-like many American Jews-- I have found much wisdom in the Buddhist tradition. In his book, Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away, the Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah teaches us "…to look in the present and see the impermanence of body and mind." He speaks of the peace that comes from "letting go" of attachment-whether to the newest electronic gadget, a rigidly-held belief, or even a beloved friend or family member. When he was five, Ajahn Chah's father died suddenly, and this left a deep wound in the young boy-one that prompted him to meditate on the fragility and transience of human life. I lost my father to cancer when I was 17, and the loss surely shaped my sense of the world as a place where nothing could be taken for granted.
In my teens and twenties, I saw mortality as something to defeat-there's that cure for cancer again-but lately, I have to come to see death in somewhat more conciliatory terms. No, I don't welcome the idea of personal oblivion. But having imbibed the teachings of the Buddhists, and their Greco-Roman cousins, the Stoics, I now try to see death as one of the necessary processes of Nature. The late Steve Jobs reflected a bit of this Stoic wisdom in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech. "No one wants to die," Jobs said. "Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent."
Now, I don't want to convey the mistaken impression that I spend all day contemplating the prospect of death! My life is packed with the blessings of a wonderful marriage, a challenging career and-more recently-the indolent pleasures of semi-retirement. In fact, I've been thinking a great deal lately about gratitude, and how fundamental it is to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia--"the flourishing life." First, of course, is gratitude for life. How many people in the history of the world have lived beyond 60 years? (In 1900, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was about 50 years--now it is over 77). In the Jewish faith, we are instructed to begin each day with a prayer of thankfulness, known as the modeh ani. In English, the prayer goes, "Thankful am I before you, living and eternal King, that you have returned my soul within me with compassion; abundant is Your faithfulness." The Rabbis tell us that we return God's faithfulness with our own by expressing a prayer of thanksgiving each day.
I have to admit, I don't say the exact words of this prayer, but each day, I do find a way of thanking God for life and health-and for the innumerable blessings in my life. When I think of the woes I have witnessed over the last 30 years-the sorrows and sickness of friends and loved ones, the suffering of so many of my patients-I would count myself a fool if I didn't feel immense gratitude for my life. I am especially fond of a Buddhist teaching, which I have taped to my computer monitor: "Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little; and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick; and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so let us all be thankful."
And, with the advancing years, I have lost patience with a certain type of intellectual virtuosity. As a college student, and even as young physician, I devoted a good deal of time to esoteric subjects in philosophy and theology-I can still spout off St. Anselm's "ontological argument" proving the existence of God! In my later years, I have become much more interested in personal ethics-not so much the theory, as the everyday practice. In my book, Becoming a Mensch, I tried to develop the idea that each of us can become a better person by practicing a few simple habits in our daily lives-for example, civility, honesty, and kindness. I am guided by a wonderful teaching from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said, "When I was young I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people." Indeed, kindness is arguably the core value within all the major faiths. When the Dalai Lama was asked to explain his religion, he replied, "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness." Imagine what the world would be like if each of us were to put that teaching into practice! I fall short of the mark every day, but I find that my life is greatly enriched by the mere effort of practicing kindness.
And yet, and yet: I come full circle to the epigram that begins this essay, from the late Stanley Kunitz's poem, "King of the River." (Kunitz died in 2006, at the age of 101). Ostensibly a poem about salmon, "King of the River" is of course much more than that. When he was in his 70s, Kunitz was interviewed by Chris Busa, for the Paris Review. Kunitz said of this poem, "It may be pertinent that I experienced a curious elation while confronting the unpleasant reality of being mortal, the inexorable process of my own decay. Perhaps I had managed to "distance" my fate-the salmon was doing my dying for me."
But the lines from "King of the River" that have always stuck with me are these: "The great clock of your life/is slowing down,/and the small clocks run wild." What did Kunitz mean by this? I don't know, and maybe Kunitz didn't, either. (In his interview, he made the point that, "A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. It takes on a life and a will of its own.") Yes-and a poem holds meanings for its readers that often go well beyond the intention of the poem's author. I understand the "great clock" of my life as simply my own limited, "biological" time as a human being. But what of "the small clocks" that "run wild"? For me, these are the myriad plans, hopes, desires, projects and passions that I may never realize, but which are an unkillable part of my nature and being. They are the beneficent remains of that demon-sprite that possessed me and drove me, in my youth. And while I honor the emotional "equanimity" the Stoics called ataraxia, I find it a bit too staid for my later years. I pray that the small clocks of my life run wild, for whatever time I have been granted.
Ronald Pies MD is Professor of Psychiatry and Lecturer on Bioethics & Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University; and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. He is the author of several books on philosophy and ethics, as well as several collections of poems and short stories.
