A small meditation on holding a mirror to our hearts

On July 24th in 1901 that William Sydney Porter was released from prison.

He tried his hand at a number of jobs. He was at one time or another a pharmacist, a bank teller, and even a journalist. But it was Porter’s work as a bank teller that led to his indictment for embezzlement and the sequence of events leading to this day.

He fled to Honduras, returning to America only when he learned his wife whom he had planned on joining him in Central America, was diagnosed with tuberculosis and that she was dying. He returned and he was allowed his free on bail. Porter’s wife died in 1897.

The following year he was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.

During all this time he was also writing.

He used various pseudonyms. Eventually he settled on O Henry.

He may not have been very good at banking, or, maybe it was embezzling. But it turned out he had an unusually clear eye for the human condition, and our many foibles.

For me this triggers my thoughts about the great project of introspection.

I find the most important aspect of this as a path through our various ways of clinging to our delusions and to a door through which we can walk to a sort of freedom. A mysterious, terrible, and beautiful thing.

But there’s another project, not quite the same, but it walks much of the way in tandem with that other one. It is an exploration of the shape of our individual lives, found as a relentless investigation of our many identities and the stories we tell ourselves. I’ve found when it is done with compassion as well as honestly, it leads to a softening of the heart, and makes a vastly better human.

A good thing.

I don’t think Mr Porter got the first great project, I see no evidence he thought about it. But he did a lot of the other project, as evidenced by his writing. He loved the ironies of our human condition, and was sometimes maybe even a bit cruel in his presentation of the flow of consequences.

Irony, you know. Maybe the substance of our lives. It certainly opens us to humility, which is itself the gateway to wisdom.

And in this O Henry showed a bit of how we might engage.

So a day to note, I think.

And maybe an invitation into a bit self-reflection our own own parts…