Reverie in Being

Last evening I felt for the first time our child move. My wife had called me to her as she had felt something different. With my hand on my wife's belly I began talking and almost immediately I felt a kick. This went on for several minutes. The feeling associated with it is one that can only be known by those who have experienced it for themselves (so go out right now, find a pregnant woman and put your hand on her belly!). This morning as I reflected on the experience I thought to myself how so many other expectant parents and relatives had undergone the same sensation. I wondered, strangely, if that cheapened it any. That is, did the fact that this same experience has been shared by so many diminish its significance?

The quick answer I arrived at was no, of course not. I have never existed before. My child has never existed before. Thus this event has never occurred in the same way, place, time, etc., as have all other similar occurrences. I think though for many people this argument doesn't work. At times it seems that much of what we hear and see through various media encourage the need for us to feel different. It is the bloody flag of individualism - that unless we are somehow extremely unique then our worth is severely diminished. I suppose that the advertising community has a great stake in creating and sustaining this feeling within us as consumers. Yet I think we are capable of providing this same sense of diminished value in the experience of the common. We dismiss feelings and their understandings as “cliché.” What a terribly horrible argument. How weak, and yet so possibly devastating. I believe that many times the insult is more a sign of the timidity of the one who hurls it. Does it remind us of our own loss of the ability to find treasure and beauty in the common and ordinary?

There exists what I like to jokingly call the Hamlet Effect. It can often be observed for example among high school students who have read Hamlet for the first time. For them, a deep dive into, say, the "To be or not to be" soliloquy can be intensely moving, a moment of creative discovery. And for those of us who are older, who have already experienced that same moment, the reminder of those feelings couple with a jealous despair over the seeming lack of those moments now.

William C. Dowling, a professor of English at Rutgers, has commented that these battles to find meaning in and marvel at the common and ordinary is a struggle for "creative consciousness." This is "a power to see the world anew amidst the clutter of habit and the mindlessness of purely ordinary existence" (see "Ripple": A Minor Excursus at http://arts.ucsc.edu/Gdead/AGDL/dowling.html). In my own words this is to find reverie in being. And this morning as I pondered over these thoughts, I returned to the simple joy of feeling my child kick for the first time and let that joy spread and move as it would.