Portrait

The easel stood next to the railing by the river, the back of the canvas bathed in the morning sun. The artist, a tall, lanky older man wearing a white canvas brimmed hat, stood in front of it, brushes in hand. As I ran by, I smelled the pungency of paint. A quick look to see what view of Boston across the water he was capturing.

No, not a cityscape but a portrait--a woman in half profile. Large eyes, large nose, head-hugging knit hat, I remember from my glance.  The background was flat yellow or orange. 

And she was the young woman standing right next to the canvas, left arm up and behind and perhaps resting on it. I'd thought she was an interested passer-by who'd stopped to chat with the artist. 

No, she was posing, her face right next to the canvas where the artist was wielding his brushes. Artist and subject both seemed to be enjoying the process and each other, chatting, smiling, even as he stepped back from the easel for his paints and to let runners through.  

The painting seemed like a beginner's. Perhaps he and the model had agreed to meet each morning for a week to complete the project. Certainly they were there Wednesday through today.

She must have enjoyed the homage of his searching attention as the southeastern light raked across her face, he noting every feature, blemish, every curve, the set of her nose, the distance of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, that nose again--no, now seeing her face as a whole, the symmetry of it, the smoothness of skin on forehead, a friendly inventory taken over and over as he struggled to capture her likeness.

Perhaps she thought, 'Let people pass by; I am seen.' He must have been excited and frustrated: such a chance to study and capture a face but with results so unsatisfactory. Perhaps he thought, 'The actual face continually critiques the image right next to it.'

The process seemed a bit too intimate for such a public place; perhaps it deliberately so. In any case, no one going by cared but walked on or ran or pushed strollers by.

Still I envied the pair their encounter: the time they were taking for their task, the attractiveness of the setting they'd chosen, his opportunity to closely consider and honor an interesting face in oils, her chance to be looked at carefully and her beauty really seen. My view of the process was fleeting; they were drinking deep.

Verdict

The judge said my name and, suddenly, I was foreman of our jury. Leader, facilitator, spokesperson: I wasn't sure of my role, but then the whole experience had been new, why not this?

The trial I had been on before had settled before we, the jury, had a chance to deliberate. This time, however, the final word was put in our collective lap; we were to be the judges of the facts, what was true, what not; what we said would go.

A lengthy set of instructions from the judge was almost like a course in law: what negligence was, what evidence was, what the burden of proof was. The verdict was to be in the form of answers to a series of questions: negligence, yes or no. If yes, then the next question; if no, then that's that. Questions 3 and 4 and had to do with the plaintiff's negligence, if any, and question 5 with the proportion of blame it would have deserved for the injury suffered. Question 6 had to do with damages. We were to walk along a narrow track, though at the end, we had full freedom with regards the award. 

Once sequestered, we, who had been mostly silent together, immersed in our books, our phones, our studies, quickly traded names: we would be working together. Four men, ten women, white and black and Asian, codgers and twenty somethings, we were bursting to say what we thought about what we'd been listening to for the last two days.

Putting aside the proposal for a quick straw vote, we decided by consensus, to create time lines of the two versions of events we'd been given.  Something simple like this began a clarification: this we could agree we knew, that we weren't sure of. It also became a platform for the mention of items we remembered, things we'd jotted down in our notes. Voices multiplied; the hubbub grew. Ah, my job. 'Let's get back to the time line...' and so to the questions of what we felt confident we knew and what evidence supported it. 

A lot came down to questions of credibility: who we believed and why not. Now we fine-toothed our memories of testimony: what was not said, what was 'corrected' and whether these would be important for our verdict.

We refrained from voting once more in favor of a round the table presentation of our views. The question for those still with questions was what evidence or arguments would be needed to settle the matter. Eventually we found what we thought was a key to resolution of our doubts, and we divided up some documents to look for certain findings.

Then lunch, but 15 minutes before the hour was up, we did vote, and I did sign the verdict sheet, all of us feeling at that moment a certain solemnity. It was done. Immediately spirits lifted. We laughed, speculated, commented on the attorneys, the witnesses, the likely truth (as opposed to the most likely of the stories we'd been presented), the whole process.

The experience taught me several things: 1st, in any random group of 14 people there is a wealth of experience and judgment; 2nd, strangers can work together well; 3rd, people can do a good job of deciding on the facts (given the constraints imposed by the charge of the judge); 4th, the justice system is really based on these premises (at least formally.)

Our job was relatively easy; our time on task relatively short; no strong emotions were triggered; no prickly principles wrestled with. Other juries have had awful decisions to make. But what I saw at work was a group thinking, not group-think. We knew how to listen, how to speak, how to forbear, how to interrupt. I played some part in our success, but really no more than anyone.  It also helps if we all understand that we're not going anywhere unless we reach a verdict, at least 12 out of 14 in agreement.

Our deliberation made me proud of us  as citizens and as human beings. We didn't get close to each other, barely learned each other's names, but we thought our problem through to a conclusion that we can get a night's sleep over, even if the plaintiff cannot.

Selected

Picked for a jury: vow of silence. Work schedule upended, normal routine overturned, in favor of a higher, at least more compelling, calling: service in the justice system of the Commonwealth. What does it mean to be one of the peers called to  listen and judge; you are the supreme court of the facts, someone told us. Perhaps we'll be right; at least we will decide.

The whole business is a matrix of cross-cutting second-person interactions, lawyers and witnesses, judge and jurors, and at bottom, two contending views of reality presented to the 14 of us in the jury box.

Reflection on encounters in writing is one thing, but deeds are at the very quick of them. Our verdict will draw a line which will change things, and it will be a result of our engaging with each of the parties with an eye to determining veracity.

My once-every-three-years summons into the vortex of disputes forces me into encounters as not just head, not just heart, but hands-on affairs.

Usually we subsume open-ended time activities into our daily work routines--the project that goes longer than expected, the train that doesn't seem to want to move.  Jury duty is different, however, in that it takes precedence over our normal schedules. One day or one trial is the promise but that last term is really unbounded. My time experience is being wrenched. Not on vacation, not at work, not sick--where am I?

Divided loyalties

The tide happens regular as clockwork twice a day, but standing in the dusk at the end of the land with salt marsh and harbor in a great arc in front of me, the ritual seemed invested with portent, for the oceans are sickening, and the great commerce of the mud and the grass and the rich water may be on borrowed time, though the brokers and buyers may not know, even suspect it.

Apart from the chitter of evening birds whooshing overhead, and the grawk of the heron flying away from its post on the edge of sand, the only sound is the lap of the tide coming in. Sky, sea are silvery blue but the lower partner seems to be welling up like an emotion to make small inarticulate gulps and heaves against the unprotesting shore.

Excess heat generated by our activity is being absorbed, in part by the oceans, as  is some portion of the carbon dioxide our activties release. Warmer, sourer, the ocans are becoming less and less hospitable to its inhabitants. More and more will fail to thrive. Collapse may occur in half a century or sooner.


Still, the question on my mind is the 2nd person bias of the blog. Who or what am I addressing but the plenitude itself, the great dance of sea and shore under the baton of the moon--see up there? A solemn moment in the gathering dusk, but is writing about it as an observer, but then adding 'you' may seem a bit forced, a wrench of perspective to make the event fit into my model of encounters as 2nd person occasions.

And yet not. After all, the sea and I are related, our futures linked. Marine forms of life from crabs to birds to fish have been very palpably present to me these last days on the Cape. The eagerness of mollusks to suck down the infusion of nutrients borne in this breasting tide is evident; there they are underfoot: the live ones squirting and the dead ones, crunching. The whale bones, white and bleaching by the path, were once vital harvesters of the sea's abundance.

Even if the turn to 'you' from first or third person happens to be less than fully heartfelt, it does represent an acknowledgement of, what, the space open in relationships for a kind of loyalty, however thin and qualified. In fact, it seems to me, on reflection, that part of the risk of any encounter is this addition of one more to our set of already divided loyalties. Part of living a life of encounters is managing the moral pulls toward multiple 'yous' without betraying any. Naturally, we'll fail sometimes, but that's implicit in the project.

A direct encounter allows one to be loyal to the Other in the midst of an occasion right here, right now, but to report on, reflect in public on, an encounter is another division of loyalties: to the Other and to the audience. Both must be honored somehow.

As a teacher of business people practicing English, I've become acquainted with the literature of those who advise people with multiple bosses, multiple missions, multiple clients (and families to boot) in a high-pressure environment. Recommendations: compartmentalizing decision, setting priorities, trying to homogenize interests, setting up systems of checks and balances. Perhaps most important is the recognition and acceptance of the plural nature of the world we find ourselves living in. A life of encounter involves that.

The intense beauty of the classic evening on the shore along with the dread of the sickening sea are part of the encounter I had, part of the augmented sense of urgency that I feel to preserve you, oh plenitude, in your full livingness. Yes, I must pack, drive, work, and so on, but an encounter has occurred, and I don't want the moment to be forgotten.

3D-ED

On June 30, I downloaded the app 1 Second Everyday and began another recording project. Each day since (with one exception), I've taken a video which has been trimmed to a second and added to the previous seconds to make a record of my daily life. ESL classes at Bunker Hill, kayaks on the Broad Canal, campsite scenes from Wellfleet, fireworks on the Quincy shore, each have a single second place in the compilation film which would last something less than half a minute.

The idea is that even a second can trigger memories that can rescue our days from oblivion. Some days produce several videos I have to select from, asking myself what what was aesthetic should be chosen for the compilation, or what was unique.

In any case I'm back at intentionally scanning the flow of my life in terms for its, in this case, memory-stimulating moments.

This is similar to what I was about through most of 2014 and into this year, except that then I was looking  in my life for encounters, engagements with Others and otherness, which I take to be the quanta of value in our lives. Looking for 1SE memorability moments sharpens my attention to what make each day special? Can 1SE teach anything else..

How about an app for recording our daily encounters, based on the idea of 3D-ED: discovering, daring and debriefing encounters daily.  If I could make one recommendation to the world, it would be that everyone do just this--discover, dare, and debrief encounters each and every day as a deliberate life program. It's possible as I think my year-long series demonstrated.

Why would one start such a program. The question of why we do what is good or good for us is regularly debated. As I consider, for example, running, I can see at least three incentives. The first is the anticipation of the good feeling that follows a run, the new energy, the new mobility, the breath, the relaxation... Sure, there are aches and pains sometimes, but overall I feel great after a run. After a period of idleness, I'm physically and mentally peevish.

The second is my interest in the goings-on around town, first of all, the weather, then the other people out going through their morning motions. There's progress on construction sites to notice, tree and flower development to admire, new things to see which I'd missed before. Having just finished listening to Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill, I was interested, for instance, to run up the slope of Pleasant Street toward the Monument Park as the British regulars probably toiled upward toward the fortifications commanded by William Prescott.

The third incentive is my loyalty to my own commitment to run. I want to discipline myself to run under all conditions (well, almost all) for the sake of keeping myself to a routine. It's that consistency which makes the other benefits possible, thus reinforcing what seems to me a positive cycle.

I can feel the third incentive as a kind of urgency: today is the day to suit up and go.Tomorrow will also be able to refer to 'today' but that doesn't blunt the spur: it's time to go now, time to look for memory triggers now, time to discover and dare and debrief encounters now.

There are the urgencies of circumstance (often in the form of crises) and the urgencies of desire (often in the form of crescendos), but 3D-ED (three-D, E-D) depends on the cooler urgencies of obligation (especially to oneself), altogether cooler but no less real.

I think about the lastingness of my encounters in much the same way as I do the pension money I look forward to using a few years hence. I'm not worried with regard to the long term, but  I do really want to make these moments I live now as rich and significant as possible, and that means hewing to a regimen of discovering, daring and debriefing encounters daily, of risking and reflecting on direct, indirect and invented encounters, of consciously channeling God-in-love wooing the Beloved other in and through the medium of the universe.

I'm not in fact as a disciplined as one side of me would like me to be, because there's another side that wants to explore different kinds of engagements to see if they can be encounters (a distractedness with fights with consistency). Then there's my resistance to the self-righteous tendencies of even self-discipline.

Still, encounters are encounters; this is not a head-game but a way of being in the world. I'm sure I'll fail, miss the mark, lapse but equally sure that, willy-nilly, encounters will happen, and that I can make their occurrence more frequent, more profound, more meaningful if I adopt the 3D-ED program.

Can there be an app to facilitate the daily discovery, daring, debriefing of encounters? Can there be a way for different people to share their encounters and so encounter each others encounters? Can this way of being alive become general practice, a source of health and hope for  us all?

Fishing

'That's big enough to pull in a shark', I said to the older man on the bench, about the thick fishing pole leaning against the railing just upstream of the dam. But he said nothing, being busy at work preparing another rod for service. His fingers were large but nimble, his clothes unkempt, the skin on his face black and saggy, his teeth few and randomly distributed. Yet this was a regular fisherman fishing. His appearance might have been of no account to him; age and its humiliations irrelevant. There was a line in the water and another soon to come: this is what mattered.

I thought of my vanities, the pride I take in my trimness, in the way I dress, in my grooming, my teeth, my studied alertness, and of how I might feel if I were he, looking as battered by time and trials as he did. But then, I thought, he's a fisherman fishing, that is, a person doing what he loves. To be wholly engrossed in something might also render me indifferent to my decaying appearance or powers, and hopefully will. 

Can't you see?

The doors slide open and disgorge a hundred or more: the young with packs, the old with satchels, the slender and the obese, the lithe and the limping, the tattooed and the tanned, a mass moving up the platform sorting itself into two streams, escalator on the right, stairs on the left. After dodging around this one, gesturing this other one forward, wriggling through the queue--oops, this bemused person in front just stopped dead in her tracks; quick slip behind--I'm at the first step of the stairs.

We are four abreast, filling the stairs side to side, slogging upward, single step by single step, from the platform to the main floor of the station. One young man wants to take the steps two at a time, but the moving mass has no extra spaces, will not speed up. I'm not aware of that bulging butt or droopy drawers right in front of my face but rather the diversity of footwear--sandals, stilettos, boots, hi-tops, pumps--as my head is down as I concentrate on not tripping.

Then, suddenly, some young man, or girl, or family stream heading impetuously counter-current down the stairs, perhaps against the railing, perhaps right in the middle. I look up to see someone coming the other way who expects me to move, me to move where? I miss my step and stumble as I squeeze into the already packed herd of humanity beside me. Heedless, the descenders push through imperiously, like Moses through the Red Sea. Couldn't you just wait, I ask myself. Can't you see how many we are, more or less blindly toiling our way to the surface? Forebear just a moment, why don't you. Why insist on now? Can't you see how many of us you inconvenience?

========

The train finally pulls in with a screech and the doors thump open. Just my luck! The crowd gushing from the train is going to want to get upstairs right away, and the stairs are going to be chock-a-block full of the whole range of train-riding humanity, the home-from-work, the out-of-school, the idle couples, the readers (can't they stop for even a moment), the talkers, the huffers and puffers, mothers and hang-back kids, disheveled Karloff men, Baba Yaga women, all coming up, when I need to go down. Can't you leave a little space for me, you mute mass. I have a right to get to the train before it leaves. You'll get to the top, but you may make me late for the closing doors.

So down I go. Heads up, look where you're going! You're going to run into me, and all I'm doing is just what I've every right to do--get down to the platform to get my train. Can't you see?

Greenhead

'There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...'

Well, this old gentleman did so too. A greenhead!

This salt-marsh horsefly with two big globular sets of green eyes that take up virtually it's entire head bites lands on your leg or arm quietly but then chomps fiercely so as to startle with the pain. Your blood, someone's blood, is essential for the hundreds of eggs they need to produce and lay their second and subsequent broods between the flood tides of July and August. No neat hypodermic extraction here, rather savage gnawing, gouging and digging. As the full moon approaches and their marsh grasses risk flooding, they grow frantic with need for blood.

Solid-built insects, they barreled around the lights we set on the camp table to play our game of Mexican train, butted us, tumbled and zoomed off again. At night they weren't a menace.  Likewise, bumbling around in the light fabric top of the tent, they seemed preoccupied.

Sit outside in the sun at the campsite, perhaps enjoying a gentle breeze, and sweat a little, or lay damp on the sand of the beach after bathing and you'll find them pouring out of the marshes and over the dunes to your leg, side, back, neck, shoulder, any place you have blood they can lap.

'You should have seen your expression,' laughed my wife as I felt one of these vampire flies hurtle into my open mouth (I was making a good point) and collide with the back of my throat like a bullet. Cough, spit: 'It's out,' but what if, already famished but provoked to further fury by entrapment, its mandibles go snicker-snack on my tender oral tissues as if trying to eat its way out?

No, I didn't suffer the torment you regularly inflict on dog, horses and humans, driving them mad with the pain and harassment. You make our recreation areas unusable, all for the sake of your precious eggs, your future. Isn't there something we could offer as good as our blood? It's most precious to us, so why wouldn't it be currency of high value to you. Perhaps, you werewolf of flies, our relationship in this summer moon month will always be fraught, but stay out of my mouth, or 'Perhaps, he'll die.'

Peer

Golden Friday evening, but alone. Who will walk with me? Who converse? All these other people going places together, or standing together in groups, heads bent into the circle, who are they to me?

On the train, the usual collection of TGIF office warriors. An old scrawny redhead guy sat next to me, his sagging pants showing pubic hair of the same hue. An older white-haired woman in a print dress got on a Back Bay and leaned on the post next to me. When I offered my seat, she pointed with her chin to the young girls across aisle of the car: 'They should be getting up.'  Yet she didn't sound curmudgeonly; later I learned (I think) she had been a professor of anthropology, which may have explained the objectivity of her comment.

A conversation ensued (it needn't have) when she asked about the book in my hand: a Primo Levi double bill: Survival in Auschwitz and Reawakening. I launched into what was impressing me about these works: their clinical objectivity, even about the author's profound shock, and was the book really modeled on the Iliad and the Odyssey...  We talked about our love of reading and vulnerability to book shops. 'I have to be careful; I want to buy too many,' you said as you leaned over me, and I, straight-backed on the edge of the seat, attended to your words. How satisfying a printed volume was, you remarked, but that you were going to be looking into getting a Kindle since you were going to India soon. You'd written a thesis once on the practice of suttee but you hadn't actually visited before, and were looking forward eagerly.

We chatted all the way up the escalator at Forest Hills, and when our paths divided on the far side of the gates, I held out my hand and gave her my name. She gave me hers along with a surprisingly strong grip, then walked away.

I went to have a beer on the patio at the Dogwood. As I sipped and listened to Paul Simon Slip-sliding, my aloneness felt less lonely. Glad to have met you.

Tombaugh visits Pluto

To have seen in the slight shift of a point of light against a speckled background a presence, and so to pull that thing, call it a planet, out of the realm of hypothesis into substantiality, albeit an item small, faint, incredibly far, the very outermost in the sun's campfire circle, skimming on the very rim of infinite remoteness, more a solution than something substantial, a cypher, knowable but not, no, never, within reach, and then to have actually gone there, a destination, over many years and vast distances, nine years, three billion miles, one's Kansas-bred bones flying right there, almost close enough to touch, over its fascinating rocky, icy, fissured and rucked up surface: it's as amazing having an ethereal vision, then actually arriving at a real place with an address. My bones shiver at the thought if yours don't, busy as they are going beyond.

Fields of freedom

The anthology In Their Shoes: Fairy Tales and Folktales by Julia Nicholson and Anne-Laure Mercier, explores the shoe as symbol for flight, lightness, travel, sex (even the sex organs), power, confinement, punishment, escape, dance, experience, status.

I am put in mind of work I once did on the aspects of locales and their associated fields of freedom, using a shoe as example.

There-ness: what the locale is & what it can be (the shoe as symbol), can have (a flaw), can do (be used to beat on a table); or (put another way) what about the locale is not settled as to being, having, or doing

Manifest-ness: the evident & the hidden (the construction), the invisible (the odor), the suggested (the style of use); or (put another way) what about the locale is not overt, visible or explicit

Here-ness: what is present & the absent (the partner), the empty (no foot), the missing (the laces); or (put another way) what about the locale is not in attendance, tenanted, or complete

This-ness: the individual & the form (shoe styles), the many (all the shoes in the world), the whole (part of a costume); or (put another way) what about the locale is not concrete, single, independent

Now-ness: what is now & the past (in the shoebox), the persistent (ever on the ground), the coming to pass (discarded); or (put another way) what about the locale is not at or not only at this moment

Me-ness: I (or as if I) & an other (others' shoes), you (your shoes), myself (my shoes); or (put another way) what about the locale is not just to itself

Everything is what it is, and so much more.

Friendship

My friend or my soul, which? I speak to you, but are you other than me? Oh, these last days, how I've missed you. Perhaps because I've not been running and so not giving you time to speak. Perhaps because you're old and sick. Perhaps you're on other business and will appear in due time.

Like the wife left at home to cultivate the kitchen garden and collect eggs, I wait your boisterous reappearance, the hullaballoo that attends you. Friendship considered by David Whyte in his Consolations is 'a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness.' Have you forgiven me for my tediousness; have I forgiven you for you unreliability? Yes, I have; come back and inspire me again, in any way, for however abbreviated a time.

'Through the eyes of a real friendship,' Whyte writes, 'an individual is larger than their everyday actions...' and it's this I value in our relationship. Your inspirations, enthusiasms, desires, prompts and urges to actually dare are what make me proud of myself, authentic, internally excited. This is livingness indeed.

In your absence, I turn my gaze and see only what is visible, put out my hands to make only what I need, un:cork my voice to satisfy only the most mundane of thirsts. 'When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or of another, friendship loses spirit and animation...'  It's you, my unsuppressed, incorrigible frolicker, that I want raising a ruckus, stamping and banging, in front of where my sensible self is dozing.

Poet Ghalib wrote: 'In this world of infinite possibility/I look around for the second step of desire--/All I see is one footprint!'  I've placed morsels before you, and you've been briefly engaged but not asked for a second helping. I've notebooks of grand ideas which, feckless one, have ignored. Once you  saw a butterfly and followed it around the sun, but now, listless, you loll. I'm tired of your limpness. Stand, glow, pursue. Be importunate. I can afford embarrassment, provided you are your best self and I, your best buddy.

'The ultimate touchstone is witness,' says Whyte, 'the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another...' So all my notebooks of illegible scribble are what I see of you and their careful dating and storage in shoe boxes is how you know me. I'm content to be Panza if you'll be Quixote. No I won't stop knocking on your door, urging you out as does Robert Herrick his Corinna: 'Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime:/And take the harmlesse follie of the time./We shall grow old apace, and die/Before we know our liberty...'.  Just that.

Ways of life

This blog has been about how and whether an ordinary guy like me can follow a certain way of life based on the the God-in-love framework and which I refer to as the PAL or presence/adventure/lastingness way of life.  Each blog post is an exploration of the questions one naturally asks: is it possible? is it real? is it good?

For instance, given the rather humdrum lives most of us live (certainly mine at least), how does presence manifest itself, or adventure, or lastingness?  If the unit of value of the God-in-love framework is the encounter, how does the PAL way of life flow from it (a livingness experience). And what about other ways of life: how do they way they work compared to one derived from the God-in-love framework.  

What follows is a distillation of many pages of scrawled notes over the last few weeks:

A way of life: behaviors and habits typical or chosen by a person or a group, a complex practice involving attitudes, values, world view; a job or interest so important that it affects everything you do. 

  the American way of life

  shortage as a way of life

  an organic way of life 

  'She likes it so much, it’s become a way of life'

So we can identify or describe a way of life in terms of 

  a) the origin inspiring, an originator articulating or a community exemplifying the practice

  b) the principle energizing and informing the practice

  c) typical behaviors and habits serving the principle

  d) the unit of engagement with the principle in the practice

  e) the direct reward associated with a successful unit of engagement

So, for instance, (shamelessly oversimplifying)

The Buddha

Escape from suffering

The eight-fold path

The act of self-denial

The gratification of successful adherence to the program

Me

Weight loss

Exercise

A workout

The gratification of successful adherence

Me

A good life

A high paying career

A salary raise

The exultation of achievement of the goal

Me

Being a good son

Keeping in touch with my mother

A visit

The satisfaction of approbation for performance

These examples are ridiculous but perhaps useful, as may be the three categories of 
principle they represent:  

Satisfaction with the act of conformance to a external standards: qualification of the afterlife 

(acts of piety), duty and tradition, pursuit of an ideal. These appeal to our performer mind. 

Exultation at the moment of supremacy over an obstacle or other: victories, achievements, rankings, attainments. These appeal to our achiever mind.

Gratification with the fulfillment of a personal desire: acts of will, pleasures of all kinds. 

These appeal to our maintainer mind.

Often our ways of life involve all of these at various levels of generality. What I want to remember is that origins of all kinds can express itself in a limited number of distinct types of principle. The actual behaviors and habits base on these can be infinitely various. However, he types of reward are likewise limited in number. 

Above I'm dealing with tri-mind (as I discussed in Curiosity and Livingness), but what about the way of life that appeals to the fourth of our mind missions: the explorer mind? This is really what I am interested in as I try to live this PAL way of life:

    G’luv (God-in-love) (not only originator but also practitioner)

    Engagement with an Other (the Beloved) or otherness

    Friendship, exploration, hospitality

    An encounter

    Wonder and curiosity

Any way of life may have its special features which characterize it. For instance, the 
investment banking way of life may have high pressure, big money and bragging rights. Likewise the G’luv way of life features presence, adventure, and lastingness, so we might call it the PAL way of life. 

Presence in what sense? Conversation and collaboration with an Other or others in our encounters, and with G’luv who relates to us and through us. 

Adventure in what sense? Risk, surprise, exertion, discomfort (as well as positives) in even our daily encounters.

Lastingness in what sense? Of course, we can’t tell about the lastingness of deeds until we see them in the world to come, but things that have exhibited lastingness so far here, have been characterized by fecundity and resonance: the invention of writing, for example, and the elegance of Shaker furniture. Likewise, our deeds of friendship, exploration and hospitality can, especially with practice, become more fecund, more resonant. We can become better at crafting them. 

However they are, well-crafted or slapdash, these deeds all partake of the lastingness of who prompts them: God-in-love, all have a certain imperishability in so far as they represent our encounters with others and otherness.