You never forget your first time

I'm told by intermittently reliable authorities, some of them with too much education, that marijuana does its magic by enabling us to forget and to experience whatever one does as though it was the first time. One hears phrases like "Oh man, vanilla ice cream" uttered as though this was the first time he had ever tasted it.

We are hard-wired to indelibly remember our first time. First love, first car (Perhaps the same), first day at school, first home run, first time of any important category. Ancestors who came through the bushes and did not make powerful accurate life-preserving impressions and decisions the first time about whether s/he was facing a friend or foe, danger or opportunity did not get to be our ancestors.

So when we get jaded, when we have done something too long, we long for the freshness of that first time. Old folks sometimes try to recapture that "first time feeling" by telling the story and we rightfully resent it.

But it is helpful to understand that being jaded, losing the ability to experience things for the first time is a common -- Enneagram -- form of egotism. Yes. An ego-state, our Enneagram style, is one step removed from being present, from experiencing this moment with all its freshness. We see what we have seen too often because that is all we would allow ourselves to see. We respond from dull and dulling habit instead of being present and responding to what is real - that the event in front of us has never happened before, and is, in a myriad of ways, unique.

We love and gush over babies and shrink from converstion with the old in spirit because we sense whether or not that "first time" freshness is at hand. Our ego state is like a fast food joint. We get what we have always gotten and it tastes like it has always tasted. We trade predictability for taste, excitement and adventure. If a One is always legally correct or a Four is always melancholy, they trade what they fear - freshness and fecundity - for familiarity and comfort.

The alternative to marijuana is to wake up to the present moment. Then you don't have to obliterate the past in order to encounter now.

Death and egotism

Our enneagram style is an ego - state. It is our default position when we face stress or difficulties of any variety. I'm a 7, under stress, I tend to seek escape. Whereas, under the same stress, an 8 might get angry and start blaming or taking dramatic action.

One secret conceit of our ego style is that we have an answer. Our ability to deal with unknowing or powerlessness is always an overcoming of our ego.

One of the sickest, most egotistical manifestations of collective egotism is the religious formulation of answers to everything. The book of Job is a detailed refutation of people who have all the answers. In Job's case, the answers were to why we suffer. For 35 chapters, Job's friends give him platitudes; he is suffering because he sinner is their theme. Job is willing to live with unknowing. Job is a spiritual giant.

Jim's wife, Catherine, sent us an e mail telling us she is bringing in hospice - the people who will help her die. I probably won't get to talk to her before she does. I would not tell her about heaven. What shall I say then? I would tell her a parable. "Once there were twins in the womb and one of them said, 'I'm going out of here to the other side.' The other twin grew anxious and said, 'That's crazy. You know we can't live without this cord that feeds us. We've always been happy here, why would you leave? Nobody has ever come back!'
Nonetheless, the first twin said, "I'm going." And did.

My grandson Lucas is now 9 months old and is new to this world. Ten months ago he never could have predicted that he would want to jump, laugh when tickled properly, eat carrots and pet little dogs. He never would have believed it. Who can blame him?

Whatever is on the other side of this life is probably as different as the lives before and after birth. I don't know what the grand plan is, but I'll try to live with not knowing. We could all start practicing that here and now. Only egotists have final answers to the big questions.