I can’t experience the wind on my face until I collide with it, feel a feeling until it hits me, or think a thought before it enters my mind. Like the wind, thoughts and feelings are immaterial. I can’t physically perceive their approach and “see” them only in their effects on me and the world.
It is often said that God is like the wind. This analogy is typically delivered matter-of-factly to satisfy an intellectual curiosity about God’s nature and paired with a tame image of wind like a soft rustling of leaves.
But this is a terrifying comparison. Tornados fling babies into space, hurricanes drown entire cities. Wind is a tumultuous nothingness that ambushes humanity out of nowhere. Its apparent arbitrariness awes as much as it disturbs.
There are times when I am completely at the mercy of the winds of life. I lie on the floor depressed and fret about existence, yearning to be gripped by a sudden resolve. Some days, a gust lifts me and I resume the day renewed by a mysterious force that I cannot summon by will. Other days, the wind is busy. I lie lifeless until an external deadline demands my attention and then begrudgingly force myself up.
I cannot control the wind, but I can harmonize with it. Sailors travel with wind and turbines reap its energy. Such harmonization requires knowledge about the wind and its ways. This is also true of feeling and thought. I can’t choose what I feel or think right now any more than I can choose which way the wind blows, but I can harmonize with feeling and thought over time by learning what they are and how they work.
The opposite view is popular today. I am said to innately possess a unique inner essence called identity that perpetually reveals itself through desire. Like the wind, I discover identity indirectly through its byproducts. Desires for this kind of person or that kind of experience disclose my hidden identity’s preexistent nature. This view says that I am not reality’s subject but its container and on that basis concludes that knowledge of my desire is the only knowledge I need to harmonize with reality. God is not like the wind, I am the wind.
This perspective imbues a temporary sense of control over existence, but it eventually fails. I desire one thing today and its opposite tomorrow. I want to be what I am not and to think and feel things that I do not. I fall back to the floor in solipsistic chaos. If I am the wind, then what knocks me over?
Like a meteorologist who can’t sail or a psychologist in emotional distress, I can know about my desire and still be clueless about how to navigate it. Learning how to harmonize with reality requires that I practice a relational skill that the identity-as-reality worldview excludes. If I deny that external natural and historical winds press upon my heart and mind, then I will not learn how to harmoniously relate with them. I will only ever arrive where they want me to go under the illusion that I am discovering my individual destiny.
God is like the wind, reality is like a sudden feeling or spontaneous thought. None are controllable, all fall from beyond, and each can be harmonized. The cultural loss of moral knowledge makes learning how to harmonize with reality difficult. Therapists are affirming desire, pastors are denying it, and philosophers are intellectualizing it away. Few are speaking practically about how to relate with reality because of the vilification of power and the sanctification of personal identity. The more time is spent online the more saying supplants doing and opportunities to see how people actually face existence are reduced.
I used to think moral knowledge was impossible, that all claims to such knowledge were equally (in)valid opinions, but seeing a mental and spiritual crisis in myself and in American society changed my mind. Mental illness, obesity, drug addiction, contempt, violence, and loneliness are rising. The fact that certain people live better lives than others – lives that are healthier, more purposeful, more connected, and more integrated – became completely unavoidable. These people actually do know life differently. Like good sailors, they harmonize with reality and have real navigational knowledge to offer.
I don’t know how to harmonize with reality very well personally, but I do know that the practice begins with recognizing the winds of life for what they are: things beyond myself.