Solipsism As Epiphany

This isn’t real. What I think is a universe full of stars and planets and seas and skies and people is just something I have dreamed and reveled in, but it’s nothing special. Others have realized that before me. I am just now catching up to what is true. Always I am a bit slow to get it, refusing to wear fashions until they have survived at least two years in the popular culture. Before that they seem just too weird. There is even a name for this style of perception; it is called solipsism. But that name withholds the grandeur of the reality as if it were an aberration. But how can it be aberrant if everybody’s doing it? I have my solipsism and you have yours. I postulate that all of life conjures a unique perception of what is, and that creates separate worlds, perhaps individual string universes, wherein each lives their existence marveling at what their “is" is.

I have always been suspicious about living at this absolute apogee of human achievement. How could I have been so fortuitously positioned in my little life? It would have had to have been a creator God who chose my parents, selected to precisely carry over traits of creativity, sensitivity, and eccentricity into an incarnation that grants access to a world in disarray that could use a bit of mothering from a female primate. But a Creator God is not what Darwin and I have ascertained to be reasonable. Here I am in the greatest country ever to have flown a flag, watching that banner shredded and burned on an altar of greed and selfish abandon, where all that has made that country great is poised on a precipice of cataclysm.

Given all that, it would seem necessary that I rise to my unique occasion and do something. But I don’t. I’m too busy dying. And what does that mean? Every crossroad requiring a decision is equivocated by dithering about whether I will still be alive to enjoy the fruit of that choice. Why buy the extra-large money-saving size when I will surely die before it is used up? Living a life quibbling over such adjudication is a bore. I am determined to stop it. So what shall I do?

I puzzle about the age of Robert Louis Stevenson when he wrote, “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” He was right. I am surrounded by wonders, even in things that give me pause, set me to grumbling, and turn me to despair. Wherever I look, amazements abound. The bathroom in my much groused about apartment is full of surprises. It was constructed at a time when small accommodations were built right into the surround. In the tiling of the bathtub, for instance, one tile is supplanted by a square ceramic handle that sits there all day every day just waiting to help me get into and out of a slippery situation without breaking bones. How considerate. And though I have utilized its assistance at every bathing for three years and counting, I just yesterday realized that on arising with its aid, it is more efficient to turn clockwise rather than counterclockwise, the better to wedge feet into the grooves of sides-meeting-bottom and avoid a fall. That possibility was there all along, lurking in the shadows of understanding, just wanting to be found and appreciated. Well, this morning I give it its due—long overdue.

The longer I maintain my little leasehold, the more I appreciate its willingness to snuggle down into my solipsism and make everything a home. It greets me every morning offering the comfort of familiar as I enter my kitchen nook and reach for the levers of water power, filling plastic vessels, hot as I can stand, one for soap, one for rinse, all conjured to make implements of sustenance clean and shiny to my touch. I have learned to just turn the handles, not stand and growl at the unfairness of a world that makes me wash dishes when I would so much rather curl up and write. Turning the handles gives me good Cincinnati water that makes my center of alchemy sparkle. The hot fluid warms my hands and assures me that these frothy bubbles float impurities away, reducing yesterday’s detritus to a flotilla of filth, gone, gone away.

You say that such spigots are part of your own solipsism and are nothing special. I ask why you refuse to see the wonder in your own. Your place is like none other because it is yours. You are important and wonderful to me. Turn your kitchen taps and be thankful for the technology developed over centuries of trial and error that brought clear bright water to your very fingertips. It celebrates every morning how powerful and important you are. And then go sit and write, and read what you have written to a group of scribbling humans. We want to hear what you have thought and set to verse and knitted into prose. We can celebrate together, agree and disagree, as tides of opinion ebb and flow. As each and all of us ages and one by one falls off the roster of scribes, we can take joy in each special presence, present and yes, even past.

Some delights are ordinary; some are spectacular. All are life affirming. Yesterday I fielded a comment on my blog that introduced a gentleman who knew what Acronymania is all about. He was able to bring me up to date about my work at TRW on NBCRS, having worked with my old bosses, Bill King and Jack Cherne. Last week I discovered that the old guy in my bible study group, who shares my love for Robert Alter as Old Testament translator, is none other than Gordon Christenson, Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of the University of Cincinnati College of Law. No wonder he speaks with eloquence and informed good sense. Such discoveries make my head spin.

Things keep happening to remind me of serendipitous truthiness. Last fall my phone went bad like it always does when I venture into West Virginia. When I returned to Ohio it did its best but couldn’t engage its’ GPS, so I chose to duck into my son’s house and borrow his WIFI to urge my phone back into sentient service. It worked. Then I left and stupidly abandoned my purse on his living room couch. My phone is so much smarter than I.

That senior moment required that I meet Lane and his sweetie the next day and retrieve the purse that contained all my credit cards, cash, and personal ID. Lane set a time and place to meet: The Starbucks close to Northgate Mall. When approaching the mall, I asked SIRI to find it for me, but all she would do was search, and search, and search… The intersection of Colerain and US Route 275 is interesting enough, but how many times can you negotiate it before you begin to feel more than a bit foolish?

Finally I just gave up. I rolled into an available parking lot and meandered about, turning the steering wheel wherever inspiration dictated. I kept an eye out for the little green Starbucks Siren, but it was nowhere. Finally, one set of turns put me into a parking area close to Colerain Avenue. I hesitated, looked straight ahead, and there at eye level in six foot high green letters was STARBUCKS. Not only that, but my Highlander was lined up with the premiere parking space right at the front door. It was empty and beckoning. “Come hither,” it said. “Park.”

Was that the serendipity that I love to blather about? It keeps happening, assuring everything stays on track, toward what I don’t know. But I’m glad it does. Like deja vu, whenever it happens I assume I must be on my right path. I pulled in to the space, locked the car, entered the coffee store, and ordered a decaf cappuccino. No sooner had I sat down to wait than a dearly familiar male voice behind me said, “Mom?”

What I’m daring to suggest is that we, all of us, create our own realities out of where we find ourselves as physical manifestations. There is considerable physics to support this wild possibility. String theory talks about multiple universes that overlay and interlace each other. Maybe they are created by you and by me as we swim in special realities, yours and mine and ours.

I continue to marvel at the somewhat agreed-upon stories shared among family members. Everyone, it seems, has a slightly different remembrance of things past. Trial lawyers and accident investigators speak of how differently various witnesses attest to what happened. According to them, that is just an aspect of human nature. What if it isn’t just faulty memory, but different lived experience? What if in my universe things play out just a wee bit differently from what they do in yours?