The anguish of fading away…
Ancient. Well into the final months of his life, he approached me, all tubes and oxygen tanks, alone he walked, beneath the burden of his portable life-support system.
He glanced at me, young, before him. Images of his own youth flashed across the inside of his mind, the only part of him still feeling young, the only part that hadn’t visibly aged, interior self. My youth was a time-travel mirror-image in his eyes. Nostalgia hurts the old.
Visions of cherished memories, late-summer romances in near-forgotten years, the dreams, the hope life holds for the young, the hope life once held for him, faded now, vanquished, leaving the void only regret can ever fill, all brought back by our chance meeting, two strangers facing two human truths.
He stopped before me. Looked at me, beyond me.
”Ahh, if only I had your youth…”
I could feel his feeling of fleshly imprisonment, empathy, feeling his feeling of frustration at being trapped in his failing body, trapped with his young mind yearning for a body to match it, angry and powerless. Why does the body grow old just as the mind begins to learn to be young?
He saw a former self in me as I saw a future self in him. It scared us both, kept the rapid clock of sad age ticking.
Ignore the voices in your head…
What is it we’re always telling ourselves? We’ve got these voices in our heads, urging us in the direction of our egos, leading us away from nature, turning us in to so much less than we were ever intended to be…and we need to ask ourselves, who is doing the talking here?
Who owns that recognized whisper, the one that sounds just like we do even though no one else can hear it? Is it us? Or is it someone pretending to be us? Or is it someone convincing us they are us?
The easiest way to get someone to buy into an idea is allowing them to believe they imagined it first — and then praising them for their brilliance. Would you think it’s safe to say we praise ourselves during our moments of brilliance? Are they ours? Is it us doing the praising?
Who is it we’re constantly listening to, and why do we trust them at all?
Assert your own existence…
I’m surrounded by printed and digitally broadcast information. Archives and reruns, redundant and opiate, drawing me in. Stacks of books with pleasing colors on their covers, fancy fonts, compelling blurbs…all full of other peoples’ ideas.
Thoughts are more easily pondered than conveyed. You’ve got to push to communicate. Work and wine make you tired. Other human beings demand attention and validation.
Television and music distract us from our calling. Pondering the expressed thoughts of others is almost as fulfilling as expressing thoughts yourself. It certainly requires less work.
Don’t give in. You need to take the stage…command the stage…crowd the stage…your performance is all you have. Make it count. Make it meaningful. Assert your own existence.
Strange Seasons…
I’ve got blind spots in my past. Months I can hardly remember being me. Cinema memories faded blurrier than a forgettable movie. The sad sequels and counterculture fuzz of my chemically induced days. Lost histories. Strange seasons.
Sometimes they come back. Snippets of experience, the hidden foundations of who I was, who I’ve become. A hint of the skies overhead, the color of autumnal leaves falling from trees, the rough and tumble manners of early twenty-somethings groping through their vague half-decade. Empathy music and swirly heads, waking lives and grinding teeth, restless nights and the rising sun…
As a kid who grew up in Massachusetts, I can tell you that ponds like Walden are a dime a dozen, a few hundred others like it scattered around the state. “Oh, it’s nothing special!” people sometimes actually say when they first see Walden Pond. Which is the whole beautiful point! It’s as ordinary as it gets, and that is why it’s so important. It means that your own ordinary backyard might just be extraordinary, too. It means that your own territory might also be worth exploring.
