Carlos Castaneda said – somewhere – that the most difficult thing in life is in believing what is happening in the moment; in this moment.

Both as participants in our lives and observers of it, we all live in two modes, each with its own sense of being and of time.

Unless we sense the context, know the script of what is going on, then we stand aside, watching. Like the watchful m/other when her infant is asleep, our observing self is content beyond the time of doing.

This is usually useful, because the world of happenings and doings and occurrences is mundane; almost a sleepwalking, once we know who we are and where we have been.

Occasionally, however, something happens at a distance, or in the background, and we fail to report it to ourselves because we don’t believe it; because we are not in its time, in our own time of each moment’s doing.

We live entranced, captivated by our selves’ observers, playing out its particular surety, not noticing and…Not believing what it does not see exactly. Not seeing because one self’s observer is already committed to one’s own belief.

Life is like a course of lectures, the observer seeking the content of each lecture; no longer noting what is a lecture, nor yielding life to any thought behind the lecturer’s presentation.

These happenings which we do not note, what happens to them? Do they bump our observers’ eye, push however gently at our life’s constellations?

Do we wake up some day to find our selves outside of…ourself?

Should we struggle to see and to believe what it is we see, in each moment…and if we do…?

The famous humanistic writer confessed that it was only last year that he bought an electric typewriter, his first movement in the direction of high(er) technology. He wasn’t hostile, he said, merely inept.

A mere inept, merely inept, the words and concepts run around in my mind’s conjurings, wondering what this comment represents: a confessional that he is famous and yet not good at the manufactured things in life? – an olive branch to the technology that has accelerated faster than he has been able to realize because he has been busy being a literary critic and the social times he criticizes are running with him, at his pace? – a mere statement because he does not do all of what he might, and we might, expect?

No mere inept. I ponder what this means, berate my self that I do not know all technologies, am tempted to dismiss this statement with a scoffing, scathing, muttering, sneering at the words in some stretching-out which conveys the contempt I think I should have – “meeere in-eept”: merely, merely; in-ept, inept!

A sudden sadness that the possibilities of knowing all there is, has evaporated from anyone’s life’s realities. I try to forgive myself; no mere inept, my fingers grasp this stem of black plastic holding metal ball screeching over paper depositing some substance, writing in lines which have gained meaning, writing which was invented, a technology of not so very long ago, to be placed upon a word processor full of plastics and refined metals and chips and connections and… A mere inept, twenty books later, pondering upon the times.

His theater, no mere inept, takes us to so many places that we are persuaded to take him at face value…

I have, I possess – I am told – a good voice for radio. Deep, resonant, full of an authority and depth which has replaced the phlegm of years spent in the smoker’s abyss.

Usually this idea of a good radio voice makes no sense to me. Talking, using my voice, it sounds regular, ordinary; just me. Listening to a recording of me, I sound, well, somewhat whiney: too much variation, a kind of uncoolness and too many edges of raucousness; rawness, maybe.

Years of practice, teaching in different classrooms; exploring, modulating have moved my voice down to what others hear as good, convincing, correct.

Sometimes when I record for a weekly program, especially when I am alone, I try to listen as I speak, hearing as others must hear with a feeling for style, a quality of voice which can convey…strength, truth, a belief in itself?

A slight relief. Temperature climbs to 15 degrees Fahrenheit…above zero. A month and more below zero Centigrade. Worse to think Centigrade: life is always below zero. Here, below zero F, hurts faces, burns feet, telling us that there is no heat here. The sun, brilliant, cold as the winds blowing on facial tissues, causing tears to freeze, noses to run like sieves that freeze on my moustache like the winter monster who tells most birds to go South…they listen!

Yesterday, walking through the city, snow piled high hiding large dogs perambulating. At each corner we walked up not so small hills between streets clasped in sand-browned ice and sidewalks packed in still white snow.

We crossed the several tracks of railroad yards which house, these days, only wrecks to be repaired, and tramped over hillocks into city woods where imaginations imagine a forest of depth, the slight deception disproven by packed path of skiers and walkers who sought the same scene, break upon the clearing into lakescape’s wind driven snow packs seeming so cold in the lowest rays of winter’s sun, bathed in light, steeped in strong shadows, sit down on bench thinking of the spring and summer and fall, all leading back to such depth of winter that we can sit there only for a few moments.

Snuggled in layers of cloth and felt, we stayed almost warm, walking in the deep of deepest winter.

Trying to understand a large, even huge, thinker or set of ideas – in each next moment. A quick study!

A person – me, for example – who (tells oneself) that I can absorb so much…quickly.

A framework for thinking well in mind, some precise or particular set of issues, questions posed, poised to be answered as…when or how…they must arise. Jump-in!

Some questions take so long to understand that their study seems to go on forever before they can even be addressed. Others do not reveal themselves and one can only guess that there are points of view, perspectives, visions, experiences, denial which underlies talk and words. A quick study fallen over the edges of possibility?

A quick study: a sense, a review, a reputation that causes me to transform thought that I may understand…in just a few minutes…or may not. I am, I do, a quick study! Am I a quick study?

Quick studies are like mirrors which reflect on me; reflect what is known already. They urge me to tell myself what I know that I do not truly know; that the logic of thinking has begun; that the words have substitutes which I will find quickly, so a quick study will fill them in.

For others or in other moments, however, with no framework, no articulated logic, no substitutes – only blanks and spaces – a quick study reveals only the emptiness of what is a study, and of the person who merely wants to swallow all of knowledge without taking a breath.