Some Thoughts on Experience

Life Is Just a Chance to Grow a Soul

            -A. Powell Davies

            875

I stepped from plank to plank,

A slow and cautious way

The stars above my head I felt

Around my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next

Would be my final inch—

That gave me that precarious Gait

Some call Experience.

            -Emily Dickinson

            I can come up with ideas, and my daughter, Leslie, can put feet on them.  Driving back from our yearly knit-kick trip to the Estes Wool Festival we became involved in discussing the human mind.  I like the word, ‘mind’ better than brain because it seems more inclusive of all that is stirring about within us at any confused moment.

            I mentioned that I had read that the human mind is different in the young and the old.  The younger mind is more alert, more inventive—quicker.  The older brain, in many instances, is able to make judgments and qualify ideas and events.  Leslie agreed that that may, indeed, be true.  She mentioned that, as a freelance editor at a local college, she is seeing that she can add more to the job than she could have when she was younger.She sees alternatives, prevents mixed ideas from going forth into print, and generally can suggest to her supervisor, “Here’s this idea, and this idea and this.  You can choose what seems best to you.” 

            There is little doubt that, as we age, we have more trouble remembering what we did yesterday, and our reflexes slow down.  These are facts and must be accepted as a part of the privilege of living a fairly long life.  Age gives us that precarious Gait that is called ‘experience.’  This is a valuable tool that age and experience have given Leslie.

            Perhaps, as a part of this experience, we are also engaged in another activity—the growing of a soul.  There are those who do not believe in human souls, but in case you do, here is Henry Thoreau’s idea of what that soul might look like once it has had a few years to ripen:

           

            In “The Bean-Field” in Walden, Thoreau describes what it would be like to meet a man in which the qualities he prizes have ‘taken root and grown in him’: 

  

      Here comes such a subtle and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice,…Our ambassadors should be introduced to send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them over all the land.  We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity.  We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness.  We should not meet thus in haste.

 He then quotes a line from Francis Quarles (1592-1644)

            “And as he spake, his wings would now and then Spread as he meant to fly, then close again,”  so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. "

             This is a night for ponderations—times when I wonder why we are here.  Is it possible that ‘experience’ provides us with the time and the qualities necessary to give, not only our first fruits, but our last fruits to something which we might all call the spirit?  (And please, feel free to define that as you wish.)