Night and Day

Doris Day at her sunbeam best in 1959's "Pillow Talk."

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

— Marcus Aurelius

By Dan Hagen

One morning early in 2010 at the Dollar General store, a tabloid headline held my attention: Doris Day going into a nursing home. 
Doris Day. Once the No. 1 box office draw. Once a living symbol of youth, good cheer and American blonde beauty, and a considerable talent, even if consistently underrated for making it all look so easy-breezy. Doris Day. An antiseptic end huddled in a nursing home. Good night, Day. And que sera sera, indeed. 
I had had too many good friends who’d lost their jobs in the previous several months, thanks to the Bush Depression. Too many fighting to keep the businesses they built from collapsing. Too many who’d been ill. Too many who are gone.
And we had too many strippers in the Senate, my friend, too many colossus corporations legally incarnated as tyrants with the rights of men. And my own university’s finances were skating on a cliché.
The stoic philosophers had it right: life’s always uncertain. We merely fool ourselves into thinking it isn’t. That’s something the Haitians, the Japanese and the U.S. tornado victims could have wised us up about. And yet the considerable happiness we’ve had, we’ve managed to have staring in the face of just such uncertainty. 
So I walk outside and breathe and expand the awareness, the senses. I look. I simply look.
“Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us,” Wilde said. “To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.”
I remember that emotional reactions are, in fact, not reality, although they feel as if they are. They are reflexes conditioned for good or ill by past experience, mostly by unthinking childhood experience, and they are reflexes whose meaning and effect can be shifted with breathing and mind-focus. 
Emotional energy can be rechanneled and reformed, from unrequited love into an enduring work of art, from a barrier of despair into a raft across Moon River. 
No, you can’t control reality. But you can control, or at least influence, your reaction to reality. And there is kinetic joy in the exercise of your powers, muscular and mental, right there in the center of you. It is yours to keep, yours alone.
So let us dwell in this day, under this sun, and not in or under any other in the imperfectly remembered past or the vainly imagined future. Whatever will be, will be.
We don’t merely walk along the edge of a precipice. If we really know what we’re doing, we dance along it, just as Day in her day dared and, delighted and delicious, did.