Distinguishing
Ihave been thinking lately about the late actor Paul Newman. He was a true and great artist and an even better human being.
I am dating myself. Newman has been gone almost 13 years and was out of the motion picture business for a few years before that. His interests turned to race car driving and philanthropy and a bit to politics. Young people who know his name today know he made spaghetti sauce.
But I came across a Newman interview, with James Lipton of the Actor’s Studio, that showed him to be two things: He was a total filmmaker with a deep and comprehensive vision of the tools and possibilities of storytelling in the medium of film. (Newman was a director and producer as well as an actor and he always knew where the camera was.) And he was an utterly unpretentious person.
When asked the key to his long marriage to Joanne Woodward (whom he said was the better actor of the two), or his success as a performer and craftsman, or the success of his salad dressings, with which he funded so much charity work, he almost always gave the same answer: luck.
He said: “I am a great believer in luck — good luck, bad luck, soso luck.”
It’s an interesting statement because it seems so simple, and yet it’s actually hard to wrap one’s head around.
What does it mean exactly? Are most of the good, or bad, things that happen to us, simply a matter of accident or chance?
Fate is a more noble word, a more faithful word and a more stoical word.
But it still leaves us rather hapless and helpless. Where does human agency come into play?
Perhaps in our response to luck, good or bad: good looks, wit, strength, passion. Or, polio, Parkinson’s, partial blindness, partial paralysis, Asperger’s, fear itself.
Maybe it’s not the lotto ticket that matters but the way each of us spends whatever we win.
Newman was admirable because he used his good looks not to cruise along in leading man parts, but to try to stretch his talent and try new things, a fair number of which failed.
After the salad dressing hit, he used the profits, all of them, to build the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, for children with serious illnesses, and other camps like it.
I recall, from when my family and I lived in Connecticut, that Newman and Woodward were regarded by fellow residents of the state much more as neighbors than Hollywood stars — the good folks down the road. They were rooted Nutmeggers.
The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp was in eastern rural Ashford, Conn. And Newman was a constant presence there, not merely a patron. He was a fun uncle and almost a pastor (a very irreverent one) to sick kids.
The Newmans lived, modestly, in the western part of the state. They saved and ran the Westport Country Playhouse and lent their names and money to local candidates, YMCAs — all manner of needs and causes. Upstanding liberals some said. Just kind people, said others. Or, maybe, sagacious and grateful custodians of luck.
Luck and timing are half the game, whether the game is a small business, a political campaign or a marriage. Luck, good luck or bad.
The other half is how we respond. How we play the cards. And that’s the only part we can control.
Abraham Lincoln, who was unlucky in marriage is reported to have said of such bad luck: Hug it all the tighter.
And then I think of Robert Kennedy’s answer to fate. Not so much his response to his brother’s death but his spontaneous reaction to Martin Luther King’s. Everyone who has seen the footage of his remarks in 1968 is moved by it. He pled for understanding and forgiveness and an end to division and hatred in America. Don’t choose anger and bitterness he told his Black brothers and sisters.
His response, itself, was an act of luck, or grace. Instead of babble, he spoke “… wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Maybe it’s all luck or grace. Bobby Kennedy was not a particularly nice man, generally, but in a moment that mattered, something noble rose in him.
And although his death was as ill-fated as King’s and Lincoln’s, his life mattered.
How to handle luck, good or bad?
It’s sort of the whole deal. In yoga, TM, and other variations of the Vedic traditions, gurus talk about a “mantra.” It’s not a slogan or personal bumper sticker. It’s a point of meditation.
Mine, lately, has been “And the wisdom to distinguish.”
It’s taken from a prayer everyone thinks he knows, by Reinhold Niebuhr.
In its original form it runs: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
The second part of the prayer, almost never quoted, is just as important and contains these words:
‘’Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it, ...” That’s another distinction. To distinguish between the world as it is and as we would have it is not easy. To distinguish between good luck and bad luck, and to navigate both, is the whole deal.