April 8, 2012
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Always
It’s a strange thing that things take a long time to unfold. Even stranger is that we have no idea these things are happening.
But after awhile someone will look back and realize that it was happening all the time. They’ll say in the sixties people were becoming materialistic, that in the sixteen hundreds they were becoming individualistic, that modern people now look at nature as a thing to be conquered and mastered through scientific understanding, rather than a thing before which we should feel awe for its wholeness and beauty.
But this is maddening. I am an arrow aimed at a million cultural targets; but what if I don’t want to be aimed at all of them? Or even any of them?
Some think we are very privileged to live in the twenty-first century, with all of our comforts and medicine, and I agree most of the time. The other times I think about eating disorders, divorce, schizophrenia, the fragmented social world, pornography, and I have to wonder if we are the lucky ones.
How come we do things that we can’t know we are doing until we do them for awhile? You don’t joke around with the checkout cashier one time, and it’s just because of one bad day. But two years later you don’t even look any cashier in the eye anymore, and you realize you’ve become just another somber and serious stranger in public.
What if I’m drinking a poison right now? A slow change in an attitude, the dripping away of some passion, the subtle change of an idea, the forgetting of something right. Why can we only see who we are in the past?
I’m nervous about everything I do because it might be headed down one of these paths, a blindfolded story that ends in a sad realization. Becoming a career hunter leads to a job in another city where no one knows you. Not getting a job means having no way to sponsor anyone else’s life, wife or child. But doing nothing means you just keep heading wherever your immediate culture tells you; there is no option of not doing anything. Not walking a path isn’t an option; life takes you somewhere.
Isn’t there a way to avoid every big fallacy we see other people falling into? Or will there always be one we didn’t see? One we couldn’t have seen?
I don’t want to scientifically conquer nature in my mind. I want to live in a universe where I can see what glory they saw thousands of years ago, where my mind will still allow my soul a drink.
A few months ago I was walking into a bathroom when I realized my whole life I’ve been trying to express what I feel; just one true feeling at all.
You can love someone so much, but a carelessly dropped comment can roll into a conversation where you feel misunderstood, and so do they, and it eventually seems like neither of you care about each other. This happened to me on the phone recently, and I wondered, how does this happen? How can something happen you didn’t mean to? I guess the only way to avoid these things is to stay vigilant, and know what it looks like in advance. But that is very hard to do, and all of our lives end up looking some accidental bad way we didn’t intend.
The mind and the body are alike; the health of each depends on nourishment, on feeding them things they need. St. Paul tells us to dwell on the good, the excellent, the noble, the pure. Once we find the well we must not stop returning to it, otherwise we will be tying our own blindfolds, eventually forgetting it was we who did so.
So many things seem emotionless until the very end. But then the end comes: the astronaut makes it to outer space, the summer with your friend ends, Gatsby suddenly dies. And you realize what it meant all that time you were building up to that moment. It is a deep secret, but values are packed into dull moments, into seemingly meaningless events, but in the end when you see how it all connects you realize that it was all too big for you, that life hides its beauty until the end of things.
But we must not be fools next time; if we see its value in the past, that means it is valuable in the present. A life fully realized is to have nostalgia in advance.
So many things happen in slow motion all around us without our permission; we must not fall asleep.
