The document discusses the author's experience of feeling "with-it" or "out of it" throughout different stages of his life. As a child and teenager, the author felt part of what was popular. However, after moving towns at age 18, he felt disconnected for 10 years. During the 1960s, he experienced this feeling of being "out of it" despite experiencing parts of the counterculture. In 1972, he suddenly felt popular again as a teacher enjoying 6 years of success. But manic depression caused him to feel disconnected again until finding a middle ground in later life. Now in his 60s, the author no longer tries to feel "with it" and instead finds meaning through reading and personal truths.

1. ARE YOU WITH-IT?
One of the more interesting patterns of life is the degree to which one is
with-it, in it or out of it. In primary and secondary school, for the most
part, I was with-it, in it, part of it. A conformity, an almost total
consonance, being with-it implies a conformism with, perhaps, a feeling
that one is just a little ahead of one’s time, a bit of a trend setter. This was
not a dominant part of my day-to-day ethos in those pre-puberal and
adolescent days. But there was enough of this inner comfort station in my
location to allow me to say I felt at home, part of the scene, at ease.
This was true until I was eighteen, when in the early months of that year I
moved to another town where I knew noone. I began here, quite seriously,
to feel out of step, out of spiritual affinity with my world. That inner
vibration that is in tune with the outside disappeared and there it stayed for
ten years. I felt ill-at-ease, with a sense of complaint, of fret, of
uncomfortableness, of estrangement, of anomie. And here I stayed, in
varying degrees of intensity, until I was twenty-seven. These years
coincided with the first ten years of my experience as a pioneer in the
Baha’i community.
I was no longer cheerfully and significantly with-it. These were the years
1962 to 1972. These were the sixties, the decade of the great break out
from the past: rock-and-roll, Kennedy, Vietnam, assassination, human
rights, women and race, sexual freedom. Well, I had a taste of a lot of this,
but it was in an emotional climate of discomfort, of out-of-it-ness. I was
without a TV for about nine of these years, lived in places like Baffin
Island, had a massive attack and three minor attacks of manic-depression
and was involved in a new religion which I found immensely attractive.
Sadly, I found that none of my friends and relatives were at all interested
in this new interest of mine.
Then, suddenly, in 1972, when I began to teach secondary school, I
became famous and popular overnight. It was exhilarating after a decade
out in the bleachers, as they say in baseball, out on the periphery of the
universe. I was a flower-power kid whose time had come; a man from the
counter-culture who was cheered and greeted with various enthusiasms by
hundreds of students. My ego was drenched in popularity. I remained
with-it for six years, at the top of the charts, loved by adolescents from
wall to wall. I sometimes suffered: when my marriage fell apart, when I
lost my job, when I had another attack of hypomania, when I felt morally
hypocritical. But the with-it, the centre of the stage, feeling stayed with me
for six years as I scaled the heights of success and acceptance.

2. Then I took a tumble. Out in the doldrums I went. It was 1978 and my
bipolar illness got the better of me and this great sense of discontinuity
stayed with me until 1982; it returned again in 1985 staying until 1987
before some middle ground was found, a middle ground that has remained
for the last ten years. I don’t try any more to be with it, except at a
minimal survival level because I teach one hundred and fifty students every
six months. Here I have to do a lot of talking; I must possess at least a
minimum of pretensions to culture, fashion, social life if I am to do my job
as a teacher. If a teacher is too unendowed with points of contact with the
everyday he or she will get eaten alive. Some general line of conformity,
familiarity, of common language, must be part of my lingo, my style, if I
am to survive.
There is an inward pioneer who must accompany the outward pioneer,
says Bahiyyyih Nakhjavani in her Four On An Island, if the “endurance
and faithfulness are to convey life and joy to the community in which he
serves.” Being with-it comes to take on special meaning for the pioneer.
To maintain a sense of perspective, one must cultivate a detachment from
one’s surroundings. I don’t mean to imply this is easy, as this deceptively
familiar phrase rolls off my lips. Life has so much to involve the pioneer. I
have found the hosts of divine inspiration descending on me, at least that is
an apt phrase for a process that has been truly invigorating, that has
recreated me with a conscious sense of the process beginning in 1972: a
gnat into an eagle, a drop of water into rivers and seas, and an atom into
lights and suns. One still suffers, but one senses that there is meaning
below the surface of the kick you are getting in the teeth.
There is so much news, so much to read, though, that being with-it in a
cultural sense is not that hard as the years go on. One learns to define this
with-it-ness in a new way, with just enough of the popular isms, wasms,
the quotidian, to play one’s part on the stage, on the show, in the theatre of
life. I don’t feel the same with-it-ness I once did. This time the edges are
softer; the detachment is much more pronounced. The inspiration of the
artist, which has descended on me as if from some secret source, is
palpably perceptible. There is a touch of humility, a sprinkle of sacrifice,
enough trust to provide that leaven to render the matchless gifts to God in
return for the abundance that has been showered my way by the rains and
tempests in this dark heart of an age of transition.
I can now be with-it and still drop out when I want. I rarely read
newspapers any more; I watch little TV, see few movies. If a book is
popular and being read by many it is unlikely that I will read it. I garden
little; indeed the things that keep most people busy most of the time seem
to be far removed from my agenda. I nibble around at the edges of this

3. vast brontosaurissmus society: I sit with my wife and son and watch
NYPD Blue and ER where the pictures go so fast the mind can’t light on
anything too long to think and get bored, like one of those slide programs
you used to see when you were young. But this time the slides are shoved
through so fast noone can complain of mental fatigue. I occasionally sit
and watch a little sport to preserve some continuity in life from the time I
watched my first baseball game in 1953, when I was nine. I usually stay
for 5 or ten minutes, just enough to give me a feeling of sharing with my
family.
Once upon a time when I was really with it I used to read two newspapers
a day and at least one news magazine a week. I was proud of my
intellectual pretensions when I read The Guardian Weekly, or my efforts to
be part of the community by reading the Whyalla News or the West
Coaster. Now I browse hurriedly through the West Australian following
the rule of prostitutes in Athens: never, never on a Sunday. The latest
serial killer in Perth, or LA, or the most recently traded football players at
the beginning of the season might as well be nameless and faceless beings
from another planet, a whole unknown race really.
I’ve been getting with-it in a small coterie of people I find in books.
Instead of this mass consumption of popular culture which seems to have
been progressively turning me off for decades now, I get about twenty
books out of three libraries and consume as much of them every week as I
can stand. I don’t recommend this to everyone. Watching Roy and HG on
Saturday night, or a good movie or video would be much more entertaining
and easier on the eyes, especially after an exhausting week in the fast lane,
in some office, or even driving a truck, or a bus. But over the years I’ve
caught some disease; you could call it printitus. I seem to require my mind
to be stimulated rather than my eye. I know the two cross over somewhere
and that Amusing Yourself To Death, the name of one of the latest books
on TV, is not all that happens when the videot machine is going full blast.
But there it is. I’ve become some kind of book worm. It seems to be an
essential preliminary to writing poetry, which is not everybody’s sport.
Mind you I’m not studying. I don’t have to remember the name of the
latest ephemeral revolutionary party in Chile, or the names of the Russians
or Yugoslavs with long and tortured polysyllabic identifiers. The prices of
coco in Ghana, what’s happening on the Hang Sen, Nikkei Dow, the
FTSE100, Dow Jones: I leave all of this and just consume print that seems
to say something to my mind, my values, my understanding of life. I don’t
expect everyone to find this sort of thing a turn on. We all get with-it in
different ways. Stories about agriculture, about economic indicators, about
fashion, about trips to Nepal, about cars, bikes and machinery in general I

4. have virtually eliminated from my repertoire. Most of the stuff about
“moiders, scandals and disgusting acts of rape and torture”, recipes for
good books, I have studiously avoided for years now.
Names of movie stars, members of parliament, who is or was in the
Senate, the comings and goings of the latest entrepreneurs, the latest clever
turns of phrase in TV ads-have all left me far, far behind in not-with-it
land. Perhaps all this is just a sign of getting older, getting closer to death,
seeing so much of earthly affairs and their media agenda as unimportant,
part of the vanity and empty of so much of the day-to-day round bearing
only the mere semblance of reality. So much of this stuff seems trivial if
you have cancer of the oesophagus, the colon, or the liver, or your child,
now married, has a carpet which smells pervasively of a combination take-
away of pizza and urine. Somehow it seems irrelevant to me, a man in my
60s, the life and activities of Michael Jackson. Sylvester Stallone turned
sixty a year or so ago, says the TV magazine.
I think what is happening to me now as I have turned the corner of the
mid-years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) on my way to old age(80++, if I
last that long, is a decisive change of sensibility, character, part of it
generational. This change makes it impossible to participate in much
contemporary culture except in a peripheral sense. There are so many
forces at work on us now, so many fronts to cover, if one is going to have
at least some pretensions of being with-it. I seem to have discovered some
things that I don’t want to change; maybe this is the core of something I
call me, that has no desire to be with-it, in-it. It is something I don’t want
to change, to accommodate my personality to, much of self-improvement
and the how-to section of bookstores hold no attraction for me any more.
I’m out in the cold with my own well-worn but comfortable and not-so-
comfortable out-of-it notions.
I take a wide range of truths to be self-evident and they form the structure
and centre of a life. I try not to impose them on others, but live them
quietly from day to day. It is these truths I want to be with, in, for, above,
over and out. I sift them through an orgy of reading and living and they are
presently helping me to sail through middle life and- one day-old age. I
acquired them when in my teens and they have served me well. They have
helped me decide what to be with and when to be out of it. I don’t mean to
imply the process is easy, far from it. For there is an element of
restlessness in the psyche that will not leave us alone but continually asks
for more. I’m still hungry: but now it’s for the phoenixes of beauty that
cannot die. There is, too, a fragrance in the air that can nearly be tasted.
Life is often not tranquil and it would seem, rarely am I with it.
11 May 1997