A Recent Shower-of-Sayings

I forget the context, but a friend recently brought this “saying” to my attention: “Experience is something you get right after you need it.”

It sounded so profound that I wondered who had originally come up with it. And so I did a search. What I found was that the original goes like this: “Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.” It’s a quote attributed to Steven A. Wright, a comedian, actor and writer known for his one-liners. Ah, such wisdom in wit!

It doesn’t really matter if you say “get” or “don’t get until”—either way you still get the experience just after or right after you need it. (The use of the word “until” in the original lets you know that you’ll still get.) I prefer my friend’s version because it uses an economy of words to convey the same message.  

But think about it: the saying is a mind bender—“Experience is something you get right after you need it.” It’s as if there is a script writer for each individual and that script writer “writes-in” a certain actuality a person must go through in order for that person to really grok some lesson in life.

This puts me in mind of what the great Stanislav Groff said about his holotropic breathwork: your psyche lets you know exactly what you need to help heal yourself by displaying its message metaphorically to you in pictures; it is then up to you to be an interpreter of those images in order to figure out what helpful assistance has been imparted to you. (I paraphrase, but that’s the meaning, the gist of what he taught me.)

At about the same time that the above saying was brought to my attention, the Trump Mideast Peace Plan was unveiled. There was an immediate response from Hamas, who described it as “a theatrical presentation to sell illusions.” When I read that I thought: Now there’s a perfect expression to describe the fakestream news. That insightful little phrase from Hamas can apply not only to media but to "dissimulation" in general—just as it applies to “optics”: how one is perceived based upon consciously staging that perception. 

Could it be that the parties "on the ground"—the many different religio-ideologies, attached to tribal affinities, with their long, tortured histories, are needed for crucial input in any peace plan? Were the grandmothers and grandfathers among them consulted? Will feedback from the People directly affected be considered in the final analysis?

Finally, and again, around the same time, I read this reflection in Fr. Butler’s Lives of the Saints: “Power is made perfect in infirmity.” Once again I was floored by language; to think that “infirmity firms”—that weakness, frailty can perfect power! That sounds counter-intuitive. And yet we saw just that in-play before us during the past three years in the political arena, wherein the dimwit Democrats have been parading the infirmity of their various weak strategies to attack and remove President Trump. This inane display has done nothing but perfect Trump’s power by demonstrating to the People the falsity and corruption (viz., the infirmity) of his opponents.

An infirmity can be one’s own too, as in learning from our own, inner obstacles-to-overcome so that we may better know and transcend our own obstinacy. (This, of course, seems not to apply to dimwit Democrats and the fake news media, who can’t seem to learn from any of their mistakes but only repeat them in various permutations. I believe that’s the very definition of clinical insanity.) But for those who live in more normative realities, what does conquering our personal shortcomings do, except to help perfect the power of our souls?—even political power gets further perfected, the two being inextricably bound with each other in the realm of truth.

There’s a quick-wash in a recent shower-of-sayings that came my way.