I’ve been reading Daniel Kahnema’s 555-page-long Thinking Fast and Slow for several weeks now, hoping to comment on some of his ideas. I’m determined to eventually finish it because it gives important insight into why we as humans make so many bad decisions. It’s clear why it earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in 2002, but, as I struggle to read and understand it, it also became clear why my granddaughter is learning ideas derived from it in her freshman college class. This old brain takes much longer to comprehend complex ideas than it used to, which, unfortunately, does not come as much of a surprise.
So, I decided I would turn to some short poetry books I have acquired in the last couple of years. Luckily, Only Now, by Stuart Kestenbaum resonated with me, so I finished its 74 pages relatively quickly.
Although I couldn’t find a biography online, one article states that Kestenbaum is 70 (a mere youngster, as it were) and several of his poems deal with subjects we all face as we age. For instance, in “Passage” he describes a ninety-three-year-old friend lying in a nursing home bed. In “Scattered” he describes spreading the ashes of someone who has passed on.
Kestenbaum manages to make even poems that focus on death inspirational, but the poems I liked best are the thoughts of someone who is looking back but still trying to stay in the moment, to savor what little time is left, as it were. Not surprisingly, the title poem conveys the main themes of the volume.
Only Now
Only now do you realize how quickly everything passes how we are here’s for a blink of God's eye how the light passes by us and through us how the world began with a breath and a cry earth and sky.
I don’t think I would want to teach this to a class of high school students because they probably haven’t lived enough to understand it, but it sounds exactly like the kind of poem I would write at this point in my life if I could still write poetry. It sounds like the kind of insight you would read in Taoist or Zen literature if it weren’t for the phrase “a blink of God’s eye.” The photographer in me particularly likes “how the light passes/by us and through us.”
“Only Now” was an easy choice, but I had a hard time choosing a longer poem to represent his work because I liked so many of them. Most of those included “prayer” in the title, though they seldom seemed like the kind of prayer you would hear in church. I don’t know much about Judaism, but most of these prayers seem to suggest the sacredness of everyday life rather than a specific religion.
Ultimately, I chose “Prayer for Beginning” because it confronts the uncertainty that all of us, no matter our age, face every day.
Prayer for Beginning
You’ll never know how it will end most days you don’t even know how it will begin. Will it be a clean slate day, a morning when you carry nothing from the past into now, or will your mind be loaded up like a small U-Haul, filled with the imagined words of your father, last night’s dream something you shouldn’t have said the night before and a truck down-shifting outside your window, so you put the key into the soul’s ignition and start driving down the road where the sleeping houses reveal themselves slowly in the dawn and the birds are calling to the light. Another day alive and singing.
I’ve never been fond of mornings, being more of a night owl than an early bird, but even I love “clean slate” days. Mornings can be tough, more often than not preceded by a bad night, one where it seems I spent more time worrying than I did sleeping or one where loud, or even not-so-loud, noises wake me up and make it hard to get back to sleep.
No matter what kind of night I’ve had, hearing the birds singing in the morning always lifts my spirits, particularly if I’m heading out for a day of birding. Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.