People find religion as they age because with time, reality becomes otherworldly. Or maybe paradoxical. Or transcendental.

So much is invested in the notion of “the real” that the concept takes on a kind iconography of its own in the church of the Enlightenment, but this is not the religion that begins to creep into life as you age. In fact, it is the opposite—and the impulse.

Age and circumstance invariably lead you to question the real.

© Aron Hsiao / 2004

At first, you do this in a circumstantial way. Which account of what’s just happened represents reality? Which of the instances of ‘me’ over the years is the real one, all the rest necessarily being dreams? Is reality to be found in the memories that I have of the past, in one from a multiplying number of interpretations of the present, or in visions of the future? Does reality lie in the daily routine or in the ever-present possibility that it will be interrupted?

Over time, these reflections become less concrete, less situational; you begin to suspect the very idea of “the real” as something that is both too stingy and too generous, too arbitrary yet also too inflexible.

Then, one day, it begins to dawn on you that you can’t conceptualize “the real” any longer; the real has overflowed its bounds, has outgrown itself. It can’t be contained in a single concept, because it does not maintain self-consistency. Every version of yourself is real. Every version of yourself is false. The mountains are concrete reality; the mountains are mere misconceptions. The sun and the stars and the grass and the trees are real; the sun and the stars and the grass and the trees are ephemeral, literature rather than substance, poetry rather than material-as-prose.

You don’t leave reality; reality leaves you, bit by bit, until you realize that you walk, breathe, are born, and die in a space that is already transcendental, not by fiat but by nature, by the ontological compulsion of a nature that is beyond comprehension and conception. Aquinas was right; Occam was wrong. The image of God as a sovereign agent exercising will is impossibly crude, mirroring the same naive belief in “reality” that possesses the young. Such a God can only exist in an empirically consistent universe.

Once reality leaves you, Occam is dead to you as well.

Then, it is yours to quest. Not for the key to the real, but for the key to whatever lies beyond it; not the real, but the actual, as the two are very different things. At first touch they feel the same to the uninitiated and the blind, but then so do the cheeks of an infant and a dying man.

— § —

To sit for two days in silence is a kind of pilgrimage to the core of things.

Moment by moment, you peel away the layers of what is—car keys and mailboxes, projects and assignments, dishes and brooms, blankets and jeans, hunger and thirst, awareness of breath—even presence—until nothing remains but time and actuality.

Here you hear the numinous call to you, from nowhere and everywhere at once, as nowhere and everywhere, too, have faded.

There is nothing more to be done; you can’t interrogate or share pleasantries with the numinous; it is not there for you. You are there by virtue of it.

First everything sensed becomes art. Then, everything sensed becomes iconography. Then, sense gives way and icons are rendered moot, like the concepts of telephone and letter, speech and writing in the unity of the singularity.

© Aron Hsiao / 2005

This pilgrimage is not to be taken lightly, nor is it available to those who aren’t ready. Like the portals to other states of being that are archetypal in all of literature, they appear only to the chosen.

In this case, chosen by time.

— § —

This is also why, as people age, they begin to take pleasure in “the simple things.”

A book. A pen. A watch. A plant. A view. A pet.

Because on the far shore of the actual, there is a special kind of amusement and delight to be found—a kind of quaintness—in the apparently real, not unlike the aura that hangs over a childrens’ tea set or teddy bear.

That is to say that you know that you are called to seek, that you have crossed over from the real into maturity, when “having tea with bear” is no longer a matter of tea or of a bear per se, but rather a matter concerning everything in the universe and, at the same time, nothing in particular at all.

So, first Saturday in 2018:

• Binge-watched 13 Reasons Why on Netflix
• Cleaned the house enough to raise the standard of the environs from “disaster” to “acceptable”
• Reassembled Oki color laser that is now a parts unit after I scored a new one on eBay for peanuts
• Drank about six liters of a mix of unsweetened tea and diet soda
• Reflected on the fact that I’m not doing any of the things that I planned to do
• Went to Walgreens to buy more drinks, saw none of the college students I flirt with just for fun
• Put off responding to a bunch of personal communication because I haven’t felt like it, as usual
• Worried some about a friend who is going through a tough time
• Got older by a day

In not-so-long I’m probably going to climb back into the car and drive down the other side of the hill to the 24-hour supermarket to get dishwasher detergent.

© Aron Hsiao / 2018

But I don’t want to go yet because it’s too early, I’d rather go sometime after midnight. I’m not sure why. It’s that night owl thing. If I could afford a therapist, I think it would be amusing just to go for a long time and ask about why I do a lot of the things that I do, and see what they said, or what questions they could ask me in turn to help me to understand myself better.

But I can’t, so I won’t.

— § —

I have a few friends that live about a day’s drive from me. I don’t see them all that much.

They’re always inviting me to come out and visit and have a drink and so on, but I just don’t want to. I don’t want to arrive at their place, then visit for one or worse several days, then return. I’d rather text or talk by phone.

Now I would enjoy it if one of them would meet me halfway somewhere. I drive toward them, say, 400 or 500 miles, and they drive toward me 400 or 500 miles, and we meet at a diner in the middle somewhere, say in a little berg that neither of us knows all that well. We pick “local color” looking spot and have lunch and a drink and a few laughs. Then, maybe an hour and a half or two hours later, we both get back into our respective cars and drive home.

I’d do that in a heartbeat. Sadly, that’s not the sort of thing that anyone else seems to want to do. It seems to be a common feeling that there’s more value to a visit if someone flies in and then back out again, staying for days at least in the meantime. That’s to maximize the “together” time, regardless of what we end up doing.

As much as I love friends, I absolutely hate dropping into other peoples’ lives and being dragged around for a couple of days. Their activities are not my activities. It’s usually boring and full of people that I don’t know. As it happens, we make chit-chat that we could also have made by phone, and in the mornings we have to do breakfast at their place. I can’t think of anything more dismal than that.

For just about everyone else, it seems that the point of friendship is to “be together” as you do some things or other things, with the particular things being of secondary importance. I go the other way, really—if there’s a togetherness component to friendship, it’s to “do certain cool things” while together.

© Aron Hsiao / 2005

The meet-in-the-middle adventure is my sort of thing. I used to do it all the time—pick a spot on the map about half a day’s drive away, drive there, get lunch by myself, and drive back. I think it would be great to do that with a friend. In general, my amusement with the conceptual and the absurd remains.*

To date, I don’t really have any friends that share that with me.

* As an aside, this was among the sad, extended arguments that I had with my ex-wife before we got divorced. She wanted to do something big for my 40th birthday and asked that I choose. I kept choosing things that were interesting to me, that were I suppose, conceptual and absurd (though other words for such things could be, say, “adventurous” or even “curious”). She grew more and more upset over many days, imagining that I wasn’t taking her seriously and was deliberately proposing shitty options, I suppose to insult her or something. And I absolutely did not want to fly to some resort or other and sit in a hot tub and eat $60 steaks and drink wine. We never settled on a plan beforehand; the differences were—say—irreconcilable.

— § —

I don’t generally watch much television (or whatever you can call it these days—”streaming video” seems far too technologically precious). My list basically includes:

• The Grand Tour
• Intelligence Squared US
• PBS Frontline
• Appearances by Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson

The last “other” thing that I watched was the Gilmore Girls reunion series, which I found unsatisfying. But I enjoyed 13 Reasons Why very much. I’m not sure about the reasons, precisely. Probably this merits some self-reflection… which isn’t going to happen. Oh well.

— § —

Everyone is an accumulation of all the people that they’ve been—the children that they’ve been and the teens that they’ve been and the twenty-somethings that they’ve been and so on.

Therapists talk of people getting “stuck” at certain stages of development and having, in a way, gaps in their aggregate. Someone that got “stuck” at age five, for example, due to childhood abuse may be a perfectly functioning thirty-year-old and also a child of ages up to and including five—but the levels of development of the intervening years are all missing. It’s as though if life is a class, they were absent for most of the material that happened between five and thirty.

I seem to have all of my bits of education and development except those in my late twenties and thirties. My aggregate includes all of my childhood versions and my teenaged versions and a good number of twenty-something versions, but they disappear sometime before I’m twenty-six or twenty-seven and there’s not much after that until the present, at forty-two.

Am I perceiving things right? Hard to say. If I am, what is it that caused my development and learning to taper off for my late twenties and throughout my thirties? Hard to say. Like I said, someday, if I could afford therapy…

But in any case, it’s safe to say that while there is a kid and a teenager and a twenty-something and a forty-something sitting in this room, there is not a hint of any thirty-something here. It’s as though I was never thirty-anything. Those ages and that stage of life mean nothing to me.

Maybe that’s what graduate school does to you, who knows. In any case, that’s all over.

— § —

Tomorrow I’ll wake up, do some more cleaning, and then get busy with all of the personal communication I’ve been putting off.

It’s never that hard once I get rolling, but when it comes to getting started responding to email, texts, voicemail, and so on, I’m one of the world’s great procrastinators—and I’m fairly sure that’s why I like email, texts, and voicemail so much—because they enable me to put conversations, even pleasant ones, off for a while.

Always has been thus. Probably always will be.

— § —

There’s a part of me that wants to binge-watch Northern Exposure. I have the complete series here, and I haven’t watched it in years.

There’s another part of me that’s putting that off, because for me, watching Northern Exposure is a bit like taking tough questions from a therapist. Which is probably why I should watch it. And probably why I won’t.