Twenty Years

Today is Aidan's twentieth birthday.  His memory still animates my being, his presence, even in absence, a continuing creator of of my life's course.  It was Aidan who led me into ancient Chinese philosophy, especially an appreciation of Daoism, and that is something that shapes my daily experience.

I was reading the Daodejing with my students a couple of weeks ago.  Many of them seemed perplexed.  They found the text abstruse and irrelevant.  How could a stance of "do nothing" - wuwei - make any sense in their busy and well planned lives? But it was precisely that orientation - yielding to the unfolding of circumstances beyond my control - that I came to embrace as Aidan's life progressed.  I learned to let go of expectations and explanation and simply, as Zhuangzi puts it, "dwell in the ordinary." 

As my students worked to gain some understanding of passage 29 of the Daodejing, I quietly reflected on the meaning Aidan provided for me:

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it... I've seen such dreams invariably fail.  All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel, something beyond all improvement.  Try to improve it and you ruin it.  Try to hold it and you lose it.

For things sometimes lead and sometimes follow, sometimes sigh and sometimes storm, sometimes strengthen and sometimes weaken, sometimes kill and sometimes die.

And so the sage steers clear of extremes, clear of extravagance, clear of exaltation.

I came to learn that a profoundly disabled boy was beyond all improvement.

Comments

[Ginny granger]

Thinking of you both Sam and thank you for posting - too true, and lucky are those who find the tools to cope.

[Eric]

Not to create disharmony. A seeming paradox in an extremely mentally and physically compromised human being who seems to strike such a discordant presence, yet, as you say, nothing to be added, nothing to be taken away.

In appearing so dissonant, the child showing us where our limits are, how we fit, and whether we are true to our natures, since they can only "be" without distraction, who they must be.