The art of living is to know when to hold fast and when to let go. For life is a paradox: it enjoins us to cling to its many gifts even while it ordains their eventual relinquishment. The rabbis of old put it this way: "A man comes to this world with his fist clenched, but when he dies, his hand is open." We begin by grasping, ultimately we must renounce.
Surely we ought to hold fast to life, for it is wondrous, and full of a beauty that breaks through every pore of God's own earth. We know that this is so, but all too often we recognize this truth only in our backward glance when we remember what it was and then suddenly realize that it is no more.
We remember a beauty that faded, a love that waned. But we remember with far greater pain that we did not see that beauty when it flowered, that we failed to respond with love when it was tendered.
A recent experience re-taught me this truth. I was hospitalized following a severe heart attack and had been in intensive care for several days. It was not a pleasant place. My own pains and fears aside, its noises were not restful to the ear: The running feet of doctors and nurses, and moans and groans and cries of pain and on two occasions during those days the dances and the rattling of death, and then the weeping of the suddenly bereaved.
One morning, I had to have some additional tests. The required machines were located in a building at the opposite end of the hospital, so I had to be wheeled across the courtyard on a gurney.
As we emerged from our unit, the sunlight hit me. That's all there was to my experience. Just the light of the sun, and yet how beautiful it was - how warming, how sparkling, how brilliant!
I looked to see whether anyone else relished the sun's golden glow, but everyone was hurrying to and fro, most with eyes fixed on the ground. Then I remembered how often I, too, had been indifferent to the grandeur of each day, too preoccupied with petty and sometimes even mean concerns to respond to the splendor of it all.
The insight gleaned from that experience is really as commonplace as was the experience itself: Life's gifts are precious - but we are too heedless of them. Thornton Wilder makes this point in one of his magnificent creations, his immortal Our Town. In this play, a young woman who died in childbirth is allowed to return to earth for just one day. She chooses her sixteenth birthday as the day she would like to re-live. But as she comes upon the scene so familiar to her she finds that everyone is far too busy to relish the day's wonder. Even her parents pay no attention to her, thus she asks to go where she belongs.
Is not this the malady that afflicts us? We are blind, blind to so much of the beauty which abounds in our world. We walk about in a cloud of ignorance. We trample on the feelings of those who love us. We spend and waste time as though we had a million years to live always at the mercy of one self-centered passion after another. How heedless we often are of our good until it is too late. Like birds whose beauty is concealed until their plumes are spread against the sky, our blessings brighten only as they take their flight.
Here then is the first pole of life's paradoxical demands on us: Never be too busy for the wonder and the awe of life. Be reverent before each dawning day. Embrace each hour. Seize each golden minute.
Hold fast to life but not so fast that you cannot let go. This is the second side of life's coin, the opposite pole of its paradox: We must accept our losses, and learn how to let go.
This is not an easy lesson to learn, especially when we are young and think that the world is ours to command, that whatever we desire with the full force of our passionate being can, nay, will be ours. But then life moves along to confront us with realities, and slowly but surely this second truth dawns upon us.
At every stage of life we sustain losses — and grow in the process. We begin our independent lives only when we emerge from the womb and lose its protective shelter. We enter a progression of schools, then we leave our mothers and fathers and our childhood homes. We get married and have children and then have to let them go. We confront the death of our parents and our spouses. We face the gradual or not so gradual waning of our own strength. And ultimately, as the parable of the open and closed hand suggests, we must confront the inevitability of our own demise, losing ourselves as it were, all that we were or dreamed to be.
When Rabbi Bunam, renowned Chassidic master, was lying on his death bed, his wife wept bitterly, whereupon he reproached her saying: Don't you know that life is given to us merely that we might learn how to die? Life is the great teacher in the art of renunciation. To heed this truth is not only just and right. It is the very gate of wisdom. Our parable of the open and closed hand confronts us with life's contrary demands: First we were enjoined to cling to life, to appreciate its every gift. Then we are told to learn how to renounce these gifts.
But why should we be reconciled to life's contradictory demands? Why fashion things of beauty when beauty is evanescent? Why give our heart in love when those we love will ultimately be torn from our grasp?
In order to resolve this paradox, we must seek a wider perspective, viewing our lives as through windows that open on eternity. Once we do that, we realize that though our lives are finite, our deeds on earth weave a timeless pattern.
Life is never just being. It is a becoming, a relentless flowing on. Our parents live on through us, and we will live on through our children. The institutions we build endure, and we will endure through them. The beauty we fashion cannot be dimmed by death. Our flesh may perish, our hands will wither, but that which they create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come.
When Chanayo Ben Teradyon, noblest of Jewish martyrs, was burned at the stake wrapped in a scroll of the Law, his pupils who witnessed his terrible agony cried out: "Our master, our teacher, what seest thou?" He replied: "I see the parchment burning, but the letters of the Law, they soar on high."
Don't spend and waste your lives accumulating objects that will only turn to dust and ashes. Pursue not so much the material as the ideal, for ideals alone invest life with meaning and are of enduring worth.
Add love to a house and you have a home. Add righteousness to a city and you have a community. Add truth to a pile of red brick and you have a school. Add religion to the humblest of edifices and you have a sanctuary. Add justice to the far-flung round of human endeavor and you have civilization. Put them all together, exalt them above their present imperfections, add to them the vision of humankind redeemed, forever free of need and strife and you have a future lighted with the radiant colors of hope.