A Life in Exile

From Menletter November 2010

By Tim Baehr

Have you ever watched a baby play with her toes, or a toddler play with his blocks? We call many childhood activities "play," but check out the facial expression when a child is engaged in play. The look of total concentration may even seem cute, but there is a reason for the seriousness. In the first two years or so of life in the bag of flesh we call a human being, the child is sorting out what it means to live in the Universe. Think of what learning has to take place in the first 730 days of life - the questions the child must answer:

● What sense can I make of the visual stimuli flooding into my eyes? What is color? What is 3-D vision? How do I tell near from far?

● What do all those sounds mean? I may recognize Mommy's and Daddy's voices, but what are all the other sounds?

● Where does my body end and the world begin? What are those things at the ends of my legs and arms? Do they belong to me?

● What is up? What is down?

● What happens when I cry? What happens when I drop my pacifier? What happens when I flip over my cereal bowl? What happens when I sit up . . . stand up . . . take a step?

● What is this thing I am holding onto? What does it taste like? Does it taste the same as the last time? What happens if I drop it? Or bang it on the floor?

● Why is Mommy so mad when I keep saying "no"?

● What makes me angry? What makes me happy?

The list could go on almost endlessly, as the child constantly experiments to sort out perception, cause and effect, emotions, movements, language, and just about all the fundamental skills and knowledge on which later childhood and adulthood will be based. On top of these basic skills the child eventually begins to learn social skills: what is acceptable in the culture, the taboos, the punishments and rewards.

All these learned skills - perceptual, cognitive, emotional, social - are necessary for survival, either because they help us perceive and think in standard ways or because they help us be "good" in the eyes of others who hold power over us. Infants deprived of visual or auditory stimulation through a medical disability, for instance, end up functionally blind or deaf if the disability is not cured before a critical period of learning has taken place - even if the mechanics of sight or hearing are perfectly restored. Feral children, rescued from the wild (or from neglect) may never be fully competent with language or some social skills.

But every one of these skills also limits us in a way, narrowing our lives and ensuring that we live a more or less ordinary, standard life for the tiniest fraction of the 14 billion years it has taken us to get to this point as humans. We are living in exile from the vastness out of which we were formed, and sometimes we may feel an immense sadness at being separated from it and boxed in by the accidents and incidents that have led to our existence.

What if we had, or could achieve, a Universe-sized sense of our existence? What if we could look up into the night sky and feel a kinship with stars and galaxies that would take millions of years for us to reach, even at close to the speed of light? What if we could go home to that vastness?

My youngest son told me recently about an astronomy course he took that recounted the formation of the Universe from the Big Bang to the aggregation of matter into bodies made of hydrogen that, under pressure, ignited with fusion to make helium and create some other lighter elements, and eventually went supernova to create enough energy for the heavier elements, including those that ended up as living beings, and eventually, us. And he recalled the sense of wonder and awe he had when he realized that we all have our origins in stardust.

How do we recapture the sense of wonder and awe? How do we go home to the great vastness? How do we cure the sometimes crushing sense of loss - of exile - from infinite possibility?

Religious and philosophical practices can help, I suppose. But for most of us the strictures and rules of organized religion just add another layer of boxes to our boxed-in feeling.

One very practical way to recapture a bit of the wonder is to approach at least part of our lives as an infant would: to take a new skill or piece of knowledge or sensory experience and play, play, play with it. We can adopt what Shunryu Suzuki called the Beginner's Mind. Maybe we can return partway from our exile to something more like house arrest.

I think sometimes the Universe tries to get in touch with us - or at least we find ourselves suddenly open to its constant wonder, without our conscious effort. The event can be as simple as the view from a mountain, an Aurora Borealis, sweet slow lovemaking, peeling a tangerine, giving total concentration to a project or experience, or the contentment of sitting alone in silence and letting our thoughts drift. The slenderest time and place into which we were born lose all their meaning and relevance for just a moment, and we are once again stardust.