In the years that have followed my brother’s death, my mother has taken to assuaging her own pain– – And the pain of those she loves – – with a pithy but heartfelt adage: “everything is fixable, as long as you’re still breathing.” More recently, a pal of mine shared, “we are both still alive in this life together, and that’s what’s good.” both quotations acknowledge an unfortunate but obvious truth; pain is a part of the existence, the experience, the existential journey… What we choose to focus on, is what tends to make the difference in our outcomes. It’s a theory anyway.
For the last couple of days, these words have resonated with me, bothered me, consumed me, partly because I’ve spent the last 48 hours or so in a place I have visited several times before. On one hand, it’s just a place… Nothing particularly special about it. There’s an old floating platform and an older bridge over an even older river, surrounded by a town with both historical and modern claims on the land.
On the other hand, it’s far enough from home that if I really try, I can think of things that I miss as well as reasons to savor the distance. It’s a place that I’ve been lonesome. It’s a place that I have felt deep connection. It’s a place that I have felt whole. It’s a place that I have felt important, disconnected, serene, hopeful, separated from destiny or despair by a pillow, or a pane of glass, or a couple of flights of stairs.
In that annoying circular logic that only works in blogs and bad teen dramas, it is a place of dependable change and changing dependability.
Needing a break from my primary purpose in town, I took a short walk around sundown. I was rewarded with a beautiful view of the old bridge, illuminated at just the right angle to make it glow.
And for that moment, I remembered standing here with good company in a driving rainstorm, no godly business being out in the elements but satisfied in that time out of time and place out of space.
The next morning, I went for a little run; somewhere in the middle of it, far from the river, I considered the reward of seeing the bridge all shiny and gold, blowing up against the morning sky, and it gave me the strength to keep running and half-ignore the growing plantar fasciitis pain in my heels.
Except when I got there, the realization that it was the literal and proverbial morning after hit me– the view was the same, but different, cast in shadows and nowhere near as pretty. Drab, mustard brown, not the glinting gold of my memory.
The memories of that floating dock flooded back; and then, even then, the pun was not lost on me: A year previous, the river was a good 20 feet higher. The weather was different. There wasn’t a homeless encampment there like there is now. I was younger. I had fewer accomplishments. I had no monthly student loan payment as I was still “in school.” Our sun and solar system were–relative to the center of the Milky Way–about 4.5 billion miles distant (and about 515,000 miles farther every hour.)
The world turns. The dark becomes the light. The sun-kissed daisies beam in the shine, then close their petals and droop in the shade.
The cycle is normal, natural. We tire and we age. We try, in earnest, to decipher the hearts and heads of others, without enough energy given to understanding our own. We float along through change, despite our memories of the past, despite our plans for the future. We are trapped in this place and this moment.
But only for a moment. Because as quickly as we acknowledge it… it’s gone.
So is this one…
And this one.
And… yeah, you got it.
When you stub your toe, it doesn’t hurt; it is only AFTER your toe has tried to occupy the space of another solid– after — that it hurts. I don’t quip about suicide, but there is an unfortunate and personal truth in the notion that it’s not the jump or the fall that kills you. It’s the rapid deceleration.
Like that floating dock, we are attached to the shore… we ourselves change, the river flows past, the waters ebb and flood as we rise and fall on her shoulders. Always changing but never changing. Stimuli begetting reactions.
What if pain was like that? Or what if age was like that? What if we could truly live in a perpetual NOW, independent of the flow of rivers and tears and years and time? What if, after stubbing one’s toe, she could instantaneously abandon that moment and pass over it–past the pain–to arrive at an infinite series of NOWS that were never BEFORE and never AFTER?
I’m working on it. Supersede time by living in a fold of it, between moments. Defying the passage of it as a function of diminishing happiness. Exhausting the despair of distance by tying myself onto and off of the dock at the same time. Exist everywhere and every-when as a single thing. What is we viewed life as a singularity instead of a series?
There is no passage of time as a stream of individual experiences twined together like an overloaded bundle on the back of a truck… there is just NOW. Likewise, there is no distance I can measure from a pal that reduces my love, itself a construct without limitations.
Just because the arbitrary rules of measuring time and distance have been established to dictate the world we exist in, it doesn’t mean my inner multiverse need follow those rules. I set the standards and the metaphysics and the emotion and the temporal-spatial-sensory-intuitive freedoms of me.
Evolution gave humanity sentience– the knowledge that we exist; not long after, that same awareness gave us the concept of death as an end. So what did our species do? We came up with a construct of life AFTER death. Heaven. Nirvana. Paradise. Moksha. Valhalla.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept. It’s just that (Spoiler Alert) … chances are greater you’re living in a computer simulation than an infinitesimal fraction of Universal time and space as a test flight of temptations and rules for (if you do it “right”) your ascension into limitless consciousness and bliss without end. Which means, without measure.
Why wait?
My daily energy, then, is not measuring time and distance apart; it is motivating and minimizing it as a means to something infinitely greater: the purest fulfillment of time out of time and a place out of space, where Good Creation and Good Consequences and Good Company are NOW without end.
…if only, for a short while.
El Gigante Picante del Monte 