Happy Monday! Welcome to The Sunday Rabbit Whole…buckle up, kids…or maybe, unbuckle?….
Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of 'the same people living in the same place'. ... We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off—when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy may be wasted at that point in a frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them onto the branches: but the sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe. [T.S. Eliot, "After Strange Gods"]
Some time before the 2022 Holiday season, I began the internal questioning on “tradition”….
For me, it feels like I have lived in so many different timelines of possibility: childhood in the 70s in rural Midwest, when we still drove hours for holidays with grandparents and regularly shared the lives and stories of great-grandparents whose own childhoods saw the turn of the century into the 1900s.
The angsty teen years bringing me through the Michael J. Fox “Family Ties” 80s and excitement of a world forecasted by “Back to the Future”.
Becoming an adult in times that seemed full of infinite potential, when institutions of authority still appeared solid stewards of the collective good - and then didn’t…churches, corporations, and government - after the YTK bubble never popped - slowly assuming the position of the Man Behind the Curtain in the “Wizard of Oz”.
Navigating marriage, and “marriage”, and moving from co-dependence to “inter-dependence” to something defying census-form filling check-boxing entirely. The decade I spent in intimate communion with a man who was from a generation somewhere between my grandparents and parents, who did his best to indoctrinate me with the thought patterns and traditions needed to succeed in the role of “1950s mistress-turned-trophy wife” - and the therapy necessary to ground myself in the present reality of my own agency. Traditions aplenty to ponder.
Educating myself in a system of thought deemed at the time “best in the world” to become a doctor, through the hierarchy and politics of academia, to see the huge gaps left in my humanity, alone to fill in the blanks with tools to actually work as a “healer” of any sorts. Then looking back with shock and gratitude at the rigorous family/emergency medicine training that filled me with a comprehensive and practical approach to whole-human care…a tradition of physician-making that is no longer.
Ultimately realizing that the glittery-gold “achievements” were duds, the gifts wrapped in grief were priceless, and the simple joys of walking to the park holding hands and laughing with my daughter made my life worth living.
Traditions? Hmmm….
I open my eyes now and see our shared reality littered with dead leaves and dry rotten branches revealing themselves. I see the traditions of past, broken in a landscape of responses varying from indifferent millenials to woke “trailblazers” to “reformer” conservatives…and libertarians appearing to champion the essence of our nation’s original commitment to collective freedom as society. That about scratches the surface of our collective confusion - what the heck is going on here?!
Reflecting on Eliot’s words, I see some around me desperately scrambling to pick up long-dead leaves, using life-force paste to mock-up “tradition” on a dead tree…ok well I was in that club, too, until a few weeks ago.
Now, there are living forms, vibrant all around us, reflecting images of deeper truths - maybe truths we thought were fortified by “tradition”…and yet in the clarity of life without those traditions, seen in more dimensions than 3D?
What does the word “tradition” bring up in you?
For me, the word-concept evokes a strangely complex mix of warm, familiar, stable, comforting…and myriad resisting forces. Maybe that protest inside of me voices the lived experience of traditions that appeared to impede growth, blocking a more sane way of human life.
Me being the arbiter of that sanity - “sane” defined as “mentally sound” - but the definition almost entirely based on the word’s opposition to “insanity”…more on that madness in this earlier post Meaning in the Madness….
The equivocal origin of “sane” yields the phrase “to tie” (PIE), or the Latin “satisfy” which both, oddly enough, are closer to what I want “tradition” to mean.
I think I wish tradition meant the connective tissue that supports humanity as a whole healthy being. Traditions describing the satisfaction of safety and grounded knowing we are one body of life in a cosmos beyond our imagining.
But it doesn’t.