Are you living with all your might? Feeling with all your force? That is the question the silence poses like a stern professor. Not, Have you done this – or finished that?
Nothing is done, finished. The end of one assignment is the beginning of the next. The idea of retirement insults our opportunity. There were child years, student years, lust years, parent years, job years, now it is time to be old. Old is a foreign country too, with its own topography, vistas. Harder to navigate in a way and easier: our limbs feebler, our burdens lighter.
My chronicles observe my adventure. What a show, no two days alike! Whoever demeans age has fallen asleep in the theater. You hurt? grieve? pine? Well, aren’t those dramas too?
Jane and I drive pass a pleasant subdivision of dozens of homes more or less alike. I yearn to haunt every one, an invisible ghost, to gawk. Each life similar yet various, invented, important to its inhabitant – oh, to depict them!
“Only bores are bored,” my mother used to singsong. She was righter than she knew. She complained of boredom when she lost her vigor. Reading a book for her was “doing nothing.”
We live in mind, not body. All creatures have bodies but only humans have been issued restless minds. Curiosity may prove our undoing; meanwhile, it’s our incalculable advantage. We can look, see, wonder, travel the world while sitting in our chair; remark, remember, make. I make these paragraphs – well or ill is not my fault – the best I can – and the making makes time waft like a vulture on the weightless air. What a gift, our minds!
How I loathe complaints, my own especially. They shriek like blackboard chalk. Tally all you might be grateful for! You are alive, aren’t you, in this moment ripe to bursting, amazing in every direction. Would you prefer to be dead?
Grim, I sleep. My almost foolproof anodyne. Reality dismays? Then change reality, abracadabra, it’s up to you. Turn that frown upside down, tickle yourself, read a book, tousle the dog, shock yourself with a cold shower, clap music on your ears and dream the world anew. Your depression’s insuperable? Sometimes that happens, but keep fighting, don’t give up, dawn waits on the other side of night.
Human life is hard if we take it seriously. The more we think, the harder it gets, uh-ohs lurk behind every fact. Dog Henry can be happy-go-lucky because he doesn’t think beyond his requirements. Better still, he forgets. Comparisons corrode contént.
The human brain is a mixed blessing – but it’s what we’ve got, so let’s use it. Tolstoy longed to be a tree but that’s just talk – no freedom in treedom. Our brains tipped us into this funk, let them haul us out.
I’m a lot to handle – maybe you are too. I’m always going AWOL, resisting discipline, taunting supervision. My journals bristle with vows. You know better, I berate myself. I do, I admit – then quote T.S. Eliot: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
A lazy pacifist, I abhor battling myself, this endless cat-and-mouse game with my defiant nature. That is what prompted this morning’s missive: when I wrote “you” in those first sentences, I meant me.
Words are my sheepdogs, corralling my emotions, penning them with my pen. Write, I command myself, like it or not! The blank page sneers at me. OK, I give up, might as well. The logic of words harnesses me: saying one must say something. I reread what I’ve harried out of me. Am I making sense?