One of the after effects of drifting further towards geezer
hood is you become more aware of the transience of everything. Death is the final transience, but other
things fall away as we crawl towards the abyss.
Boomers like me become more aware of our own morality when we hear of
the death of the celebrities, especially rock stars we grew up with. The death of George Harrison was not much
noticed, but the sudden death of John Lennon was cataclysmic. 2016 saw the death of many of the people we
had grown up with as part of a generational tribe.
Trying to explain the Beatles to a millennial is almost
impossible. It’s like your grandpa
trying to explain WWII bond drives. The
Beatles pioneered so many things that are a given in popular music now. But more than anything they bound a
generation together in a shared romance.
There were others too.
Movies like Star Wars for another generation. Now Princess Leia is gone.
I was changing cell phones a couple of weeks ago and
discovered a pile of photos on the memory card of my old phone. They were only a year old, but the people
there were already ancient history. I
felt sad seeing them and knowing the time they represented had gone for
good. So quickly . Events in our lives today move so fast. It’s hard.
Even our gadgets morph and change in our own hands as if they were made
of dream-stuff. My smartphone is
constantly battering me for requests to change to this or that, help it become
this, install this app, share this huge pile of personal information with
strangers to install this app or upgrade.
Or else. You enter the wrong
numbers or forget what you entered and you’ve klutzed yourself out of your
device.
It all passes away.
The Buddhists are right. People get
wrapped around dumb stuff.
My writing has changed.
My energy has changed. Not the
dying of the light. But the morphing of
the light. Who is this person? Who is he now? Who does he need to be now?
One of the things you learn in meditation is how forgiving
nature is. You have your sacred sound to
chant, or maybe its your breathing, whatever rubber ball you have tasked your
monkey mind to bounce and stay away while the rest of you waits earnestly for
stillness to gather. And then you
forget. You forget to breath, you forget
to chant, your mind is off the rails.
People get discouraged at this moment because they think contemplative
prayer or meditation is some inborn talent and they don’t have it. It’s really what the Franciscans, those
stubborn Christian mystics, call “coming back to God over and over”. You pick up the ball you think you’re
supposed to be bouncing and get back on the cushion. Over and over without getting wrapped around
yourself. And what you find, is your
spirit hasn’t judged you. You have a little
more stillness already, stillness you feel like you haven’t earned. The peace you have failed to craft is somehow
a little more anyway. Human beings want
“fair”. One the first full sentences
little kids learn to holler is “That’s not fair!” Human beings need justice
like we need barbeque.
But Nature and
whatever God set it into motion, as near as I can tell, isn’t keeping
score. The most vile of us can
inexplicably burst into noble glory in an instant and reinvent themselves. The best of us can always fall. That isn’t fair. That isn’t just. Thank God.
My mind is changing.
It’s harder to write stories, harder to turn the TV off and read. Harder to sit in silence without a guilty
list of tasks. I feel myself in the act
of dying even as I’m being reincarnated in some now form. My experience of the world is already
different. The other discovery, not a
lesson, one gets from contemplative mediation is the discovery that you are not
your thoughts. Awareness and thoughts
are separate. Thoughts are something you
do constantly, as beyond you as a sneeze.
Awareness, is that who we are?
Who is this observer watching the thoughts come and go?
I have died many times in this life and been reincarnated as
the next version of myself, just as Lisabet was once a shy and frightened girl
and became a bold writer and public speaker.
As Whitman says “I contain multitudes” including personas I haven’t
become yet. I am always losing
myself. I am always dying to
myself. I am always losing the ones I
love and seeing them return from the dead as some new version of themselves who
may or may not have a place for me in their new lives.
"You have your sacred sound to chant, or maybe its your breathing, whatever rubber ball you have tasked your monkey mind to bounce and stay away while the rest of you waits earnestly for stillness to gather."
ReplyDeleteThis is a fantastic description of meditation...which I have never been able to do, really. Now I just sit and try not to judge my thoughts, just let them flit over the people I care for, blessing each one. I hope that's enough.
I do miss the person--the writer--you were when we worked together on you collection. However, I can't bring him back, so I will just have to celebrate the person you have become.
DeleteI can't bring him back either, though I keep trying. What was that magic? What price to get it back? I don't know.
DeleteI guess now what I long for is to know myself as useful.
DeleteYou haven't become less, just different, Garce.
DeleteImpermanence is the name of the game.
This is a great description of the slippery nature of time, Garce. It fleshes out the saying that you can't step into the same river twice.
ReplyDeleteThe title of this piece reminds me of a mysterious slang term I first heard as a teenager: morphadite. (Girls who supposedly dressed/acted too much like boys could be asked if they were "morphadites," and queenly guys were even more likely to be accused of that.) I eventually learned that it's a corruption of "hermaphrodite," (from Hermes and Aphrodite), a mythical being who is half male, half female. Of course, most humans are not transgendered, but as we grow up and grow older, our adherence to strict gender norms can shift.
ReplyDeleteI guess as artists we are morphodites by nature as we try to imagine other people. Maybe everything is in its way also a morphodite. I like this word.
DeleteI've had times over my already-long life when it seemed like almost everything was behind me and not much more could be hoped for, and every single time (so far) new and exciting things did develop, or new skills were learned. So I know that we go through many stages, and new ones are not impossible.
ReplyDeleteI can see getting "morphite" out of "hermaphrodite," but my first thought about the title was along the lines of morphing, changing from one identity into another. Sometimes this isn't even a matter of time, but of circumstance; my identity changes according to what i'm doing, from family care--especially of my elderly father--all the way to nipping off to the city for readings of erotica with contributors to my anthologies. If I believed at all in astrology--which I don't--I'd claim that being a Gemini entitles me to more than one persona.
Giving erotica readings especially sounds like fun. I'd love to be asked to do that, especially now that it's cool.
ReplyDeleteGorgeous piece. That sort of feeling and nostalgia has been with me my whole life. I remember once, not long after graduating from high school, when I was sitting in an ice cream shop feeling miserable and missing the person I had been a few years ago, and it occurred to me, with stunning clarity, that in a few years I'd be missing that moment in the ice cream shop, that person I was right then. It was true, too. So I always feel nostalgic, and I always grieve for the past self, but I try to remember that my present self is something I'll one day grieve over, too.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it amazing? If there is such a thing as reincarnation, it's probably fortunate we don't remember our past lives. Imagine feeling nostalgic for a whole life that is gone? A great love, long dead, children long gone, a self long gone. As though life itself were a dream we keep waking up from.
ReplyDelete