Fading Into Clarity

   This all began some forty years ago, back when I was writing newsletters and publishing a few incidental articles in magazines, back when I was reflecting on a younger life, a time when life was rather carefree and moving along steadily on that treadmill.  It would be among my first forays into the world of questioning, a world that fascinated me with a balance of accepting what was and asking what could be; and I was far from alone for there was a tidal wave of music and social norms that were collapsing, not necessarily taking over the old but showing others that choices existed and that individual decisions were just that...to be made by individuals, even people like you and me.  So way back, here's what I wrote (and what became the introduction of this blog): 

    It seemed difficult to believe that this foreign land of painted birds and woven greenery could hide such hatred, a hatred rationalized by political growth or religious righteousness.  How could this beauty, this stinking scenery, have gone so wrong, riddled with bullets and death. Some tour.
    The questions from the rebels came sharply, the English broken and put back together with the barrel of a gun.  "You treacherous pig, you filth of the land...why should be spare you?"  No answer.  Click, the blast...thud.  They were three people away.  Three!  Half the busload.
    So what about me?  What would I say?  What was the right answer?  I'm a writer?  No, I'm a worker.  I'm human, one of them.  I..I'm innocent.  I've done...I've done.  I've done what?  Where were the words?  Click, a crying 'no.'  Thud.
    Think man, think!  Stop sweating and think.  Click.  I've worked for my beliefs, for instance I've...I've.  The explosion.  Don't cry!  I've what?  I've done a lot.  I've gotten a degree in...Thud. "And you?..."
    Next.  I was next!  What would I say?  A plea of mercy or a spit in the eye?  A tear or a look of anger?  What they wanted was an answer, and that answer came in a look of terror or a look of disbelief.  Death was really here...suddenly, cold and without sorrow.  Thud.  "And YOU..."  A kick to my ribs.
    The eyes I looked into were fury in the wild, anger gone crazy, a freed murderer.  Only the barrel of the gun seemed colder, emotionless to the end.  I looked back into the eyes.  Why should I be spared?  What had I done?  I had let dreams slip, let ideas float away.  I had finished projects and had never started others.  I had killed --in my own way-- by never creating.  By always seeing tomorrow.  But I had lived.  Not a perfect life, not a perfect anything.  I had simply felt good about being alive, about making and losing friends, about knowing and not knowing myself.  About fewer regrets than I had expected.  That was why.  That was my answer.  I looked up and saw his smile.
    Click.  

    So, why would I be pondering such thoughts even today?  In many ways it's good to glance back and feel that personal coach inside you giving you a dose of humility, allowing you to recognize where you've been and perhaps help you steer the bus in the direction you now want to go.  Part of this might be in seeing the life around me, watching my mother and maybe even watching a series such as Henning Mankell's Swedish version of Wallander where even the lead actor Krister Hinriksson told The Guardian (on ending the series): It is sometimes good to press the delete button.  Even in the case of my dogs, their ages now catching up with them and their arthritis doing the same, they are seemingly just puzzled at what is going on, why their legs are no longer functioning as before or why their walks are not quite as long yet are a bit more painful.

   Our memories help us to partially freeze that, to take us to a point where our lives were real or were as real as we could imagine even when those memories begin to fragment or fail (a story I wrote ages ago, as have many other writers, viewed life as a projection and little more, our physical bodies non-existent even if they felt physically there and dimensional, a study and harvesting of only what we could evolve into and what we could create).  Our created world at that point, when memory is difficult or mostly gone, begins to crumble like a biscuit whose crumbs are falling to the floor.  It's must be as if we are watching in horror as the biscuit grows smaller and smaller, witnessing and yet fearing the day when the biscuit is gone entirely, our life history broken apart and returning to whence it came.  It can be scary, especially for those either undergoing it (as in my mother), leaving me wondering if that is what awaits me?  Is it genetically carried over?  She's in her 90s so would I have that long?  To remember?  To live?  Is all that genetic as well?  And why would I worry about such a thing?

   It's sometimes a struggle to figure it out or to think about the recent discovery of distant earth-like planets, planets that could harbor life very similar to our own (their distance is still hundreds of trillions of miles away).  But why this search for something similar, something close to our form of life and our form of survival?  Is it to provide an escape for us, a chance for humanity at another "life?"  Is it a curiosity to find a near-identical planet simply to study how that alternate history had evolved?  If so, imagine the opposite, that those distant civilizations on those planets had already "discovered" us but found our oceans too acidic and our lands populated with only dinosaurs and jungle-like fauna...no humans in sight.  Or the opposite spectrum of time, that humanity --as with the dinosaurs-- was long gone and had been replaced by a species we've yet to imagine.  Timing would be everything.

   Life has no guarantees and both looking back and looking forward can accomplish both nothing and something.  Live in the present is what we're told, for that is all that we have, all while another voice says one's past determines one's future.  Grow up in poverty or abuse or war and what direction will your future take?  For some reason this entered my mind when listening to an episode of the series Criminal, stories of real cases that become as fascinating as any episode of Wallander.  In this particular episode, some indicting evidence had been thrown into the La Brea Tar Pits, a primitive part of Los Angeles that once captured sabre-toothed tigers and mastodons unfortunate enough to walk into it.  A police diver would have to be sent into the muck to recover the evidence (dive into liquid tar?).  It's a different view hearing this seasoned officer get stuck deep below, his fins popping and stretching in the toxic waste that would soon eat through his protective gear, and his resignation that this was probably how his life would end.   

   As much as space and its vastness fascinates me, I can often just look into the cloudy eyes of my dogs and see that distant life, a life as unreachable as traveling those trillions of miles.  And when I look at my mother and watch her memory come in random sparks (for on many days we have lengthy conversations albeit very specific ones with few tangents), her past seems to be disappearing almost as quickly as her future.  And perhaps there's a lesson there, that life can be just as toxic and sticky as those pits of tar but what we choose to do when we're stuck and alone is entirely up to us...fight to free ourselves or give in to resignation.  One thing my mother is teaching me, showing me really, is that the past and future fading away is not that big a deal.  What we did or might have done or plan to do in the future is nowhere near as important as what we are doing...now.  And as with the beginning of life and the end of life, the lesson might be that we might just need to get back on track.


  *In a shameless side note of promotion, my niece has been volunteering some of her art for tomorrow's (February 24th) HALO auction in Kansas City which will benefit homeless and orphaned children worldwide, their motto being: To keep one more child from spending one more day alone...the world could use a little more love.  Help one more child spend one less day alone.  Love heals.  Kudos to her and yes, there's still time to participate if you happen to find it interesting!

My niece's paper-cut art donated to HALO and dedicated to Joseph, pictured.

  And apologies for the shrunken type...sometimes this happens with Google no matter what you do.  Please bear with me (and them) until the problem is corrected...