Finish up strong

"Finish Up Strong"

Projecting Asymptotic Hope
2024-20??

(We read and write in the first person, introspectively;
please do that here.)

I've been living my life with the sense that I can and should achieve a purpose through it, one that I can and should give to it, even though I'll never be sure what that purpose is, or whether I'll fulfill it, and finally whether attaining it will actually have the meaning I hope for it.

Thus, I live by constructing my futures in purposeful ignorance. Uncertainties are intrinsic to living, for living consists in attempting to form and realize goals without knowing how things will turn out. Living comprises many partial failures to achieve its intents and some incomplete success, all somersaulting on until a final failure, death. As age advances, I've got to keep doing that, still unsure where I'm going but sensing movement looking back, a sense of something to work with in what's taken place as I wonder what I can and should do next.

In looking back, I pause, now and then on my experience in boarding school, Deerfield Academy in the mid 1950s. Memories of Sunday evenings, sitting uncomfortably on the floor, with all the other 450 students, to sing several hymns and songs, and to hear the headmaster, Frank Boyden, then a wise old man, talk about the past week, the one to come, and his genial sense of life. He could talk at once to all of us with his words having personal meaning to each, to me then and now in living memory. When he sensed a letdown, he would deftly rally spirits, concluding that whatever happens, "however it goes, boys, finish up strong." I'm still a boy — callow, hesitant yet intrepid — but now an old one, the resolve to finish up strong has stuck with me. That's my project now.

OK. So I intend to finish up strong — that's an good goal. But what do I want to finish up, strongly? That's a hard question, especially when it comes late in a long life, for after a while the chronology of life has seemed to narrow my horizon of possible purpose. Looking back on what I've done, I notice an urge to back off, to feel that I've had my run. But growing older can and should have a better, more positive purpose than merely fading away. I mustn't loose sight of it, but it gets obscured by the presentism of contemporary culture.

Information about the present state of things overwhelms informed awareness. News! Discoveries! Talents! Media hype neuters legal process. Everything's a contest with this season on the heels of last season. Polls package opinion as of the moment just past. Cascades of lists tell us what's best, who's in, and the lists tumble over themselves according to their rating schedule — annual, quarterly, or best of all, that very modern measure, The News Cycle. At my age, perhaps at any age, spitting into this wind just messes up my face. I'm going to finish up strong by doing something else.

I've written quite a bit, and published it over the years poorly. It didn't catch on very well, always ahead or behind the wave. But consider, does culturally enduring work need to catch the wave? At its creation, all work originates in a context of time and place. With a well-timed move between trough and crest, the creative context may catch the wave and have an exhilarating ride. But the wave will break, dumping the rider to paddle back out, a Happy Sisyphus, searching again for the creative context between trough and crest. It is the rhythmic churn of culture, forever transitory, an eternal recurrence. may give present context quickly proves transitory while some has a varying degree of historical staying power as documentation of significant things that took place in the past or as creative resources for the formation of worthwhile intentions in posterity. What's important to me is the relation of the present keys at the time of creation to the keys that enable work to be relevant in posterity. Let us simply say that the relation is not necessarily tight.

A little reflection will show why that it will often be very loose. Consider childhood. Even in cultures where the primary mode of education takes place through immersion in the flow of adult activity. The child's engages in the activities as a participant observer, taking part unobtrusively and standing aside at moments when the activity becomes intense for the adults conducting it. In this participant observation, the child will not primarily gain experience doing the activity, but will instead form an understanding about how the activity can and should be done.

This difference differentiates possibility from predictability, possibilities that can and should be versus predictions that putatively will be. People are succumbing to moods of nihilistic despair, feeling shorn of human agency, because we are all flailing in an ooze of countervailing predictions about what will be with little attention and care for their possibilities that can and should be. Predictions aren't especially important for persons paying attention to possibilities, for they will be doing what they care about because they believe it is what they can and should do, not because they have been told it will succeed or come to pass.

To finish up strong, I want to renew my concerns in a spirit of hope, not to prognosticate, but to concentrate on what makes sense, what can and should be worth our effort. I am not ready to let my corpus of existing work go. As it stands, it has latent in it the spirit of hope, a conviction that it makes sense whether or not things turn out the way it anticipates. But an excessive sense of foreknowledge weighs it down with false promises that do not happen, deflating the hopes embedded in it. I want to rewrite the whole to state the hopes in it as hopes, extracting from a lifetime of experience the human possibilities included in it.

Towards that end, I've drawn together the elements of that existing corpus, and I am divvying them up under tentative headings, in part reminiscent of their earlier form, in part suited to informing what I have to say with a stronger spirit of hope. This adumbration points to an extended undertaking, and here, I must recognize that that spirit of hope has to pervade the effort from its inception. The time requisite for the task exceeds the time I can expect to have in which to carry it out. How might that work?

I should proceed with hope, with a sense of the whole, recognizing that the effort may cut short at some time before I can complete it. Given the whole scope of the project, I want to break it into reasonable pieces, the first piece identified with a commitment and a plan to work on it to the best of my ability. Should I complete that piece, I reexamine the whole remaining task, formulate the next piece, and go to work. With each iteration of surviving sentience, I will repeat until. . . . There follows the adumbrate whole and the point of initial work.