Ideals

Howard Thurman writes in Meditations of the Heart about two kinds of ideals.  These days I instinctively recoil at anything that suggests that things are binary, but given that it is Howard Thurman, I allowed him some leeway.  (I am sure he appreciates that.)  Thurman notes that the first type of ideals are “like far-off lighthouses whose glow is far away in the distance.  They belong to the realm of the absolute and are never marred by the sordidness of the surroundings in which men work and struggle.”  Then there are the “ideals that seem to be created out of the stubborn realities I the midst of which men work and live.  They belong essentially to the stuff of life, the vary raw materials of experience.”

The sentences I loved, both for their understated nature and for the hope they create:

“It is well within the range of possibility that these two kinds of ideals will in time prove to be one piece.  The present ever-achieving ideal is seen as the nearer end of the far reaching and ultimate ideal.  When this happens, a man experiences the integration of his life.”

While I do not always perceive those two sets of ideals in the same universe, it occurs to me that Thurman has it right that while it is not often seen as such, living in the “present-ever achieving ideal” places me in “the nearer end of the far reaching and ultimate ideal.”  That is, the two sets of ideals can co-exist; they are in different zip codes, not in different universes.  The separation is more the result of problems in my own vision and my own mind, not with the ideals.  Or as Thurman puts it, it is possible that at some point a person becomes “deeply assured that what he is striving for in his little world is suddenly a part of the larger whole.”

It occurs to me that such might be the definition of peace – when a person becomes “deeply assured that what he is striving for in his little world is suddenly a part of the larger whole.”  This moment, when “I” and “we” are seen as co-existing, may be exactly what Amanda Gorman was getting at in her recent inauguration poem, The Hill We Climb:

“The new dawn blooms as we free it.

For there is always light if only we are brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.”