Karaoke Life

It seems many of us live a sort of karaoke life, these days, when we have so much free time beyond fulfilling our basic needs that we hardly know what to do with ourselves. We fill this time identifying with various sports and fictions, and communicate with each other by insisting on the relative rightness of our personal preferences. As in karaoke, we are each terribly important, at the center of a digital moment in time, and at the same time throwing our real, actual selves completely away.

One way to get past post-modern frivolity, it seems to me, is to take ourselves seriously, to once again take up the craft of a life. I see this around me too, of course, many people taking great care over the education of their children, the ecology of their surroundings and pursuits, and over the food they prepare and eat. In this use of our free time, everything matters, everything we do is important.

Post-war America was full of optimism about the ability each of us had to craft his own life. Technology was full of promise, the American dream insisted that every family might have its own little castle, and corporations took up the challenge of making everyone comfortable with better toothpastes, better televisions and better barca-loungers. Studying it as I currently am, I remember that even then the road to individual irrelevance that goes with technologically-achieved comfort, and the road to the fully-lived life had begun to diverge.

Though a lover of technology, a ham radio operator and a constant new adapter, my Dad had a healthy fear of human arrogance. On our lake, he stood out shaking his fist at the water-skiers who riled the lake and spoiled it for wildlife. He much preferred canoes, in which one could glide silently, disturbing nothing. Canoes have technology, of course. Testing it, Dad made one, a lovely little yellow shell made by stretching canvas on a beautifully-crafted wooden frame and painting it with fiberglass. As he never made another, he didn’t have a chance to hone the craft and improve it. It is a task he left to us, I believe.

To take up this task is to limit oneself, of course. Craft implies care, devotion to the understanding and learning of a skill. But I believe the world opens out from it. In understanding one thing to its depths, you learn a very great deal. And you participate in the importance, in the wonder of the meeting of the material and its meaning, which, according to physicists, isn’t as far apart as we seem to think. Everything we do is important.

P.S. Writing here in January has meant that I stand at my computer on a little platform on the big desk in the upstairs office in layers of sweaters, topped by the California Norwegian sweater one of my sisters made, wearing the warm fleece wrist warmers made by another. By noon it is colder in the house than it is outdoors, and we sometimes open the windows to the warm air. By 3:00 p.m., however, I am out at the pool in a tank top, doing tai chi. No complaints here about the writing life!