Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Living around in circles
When we look back on our lives, can we possibly see things objectively, or do we fall victims to our tendency toward revised history? Do we bring a pure light into the darkness, so that our third eye receives our most honest reflections, or do we bring rose and black filters to bear on where we have been. The way in which we perceive who we are seems to have as much to do with who we are in the now as what we did in the then. If we experience a significant shift in mindset, what we did may become regrettable, or laudable, depending on our own perceptions. We may think ourselves fools, or failures, or geniuses, or heroes - it is all a matter of context and understanding.
Every year around this time, I find myself returning to the same tired, circular contemplations. I obsess over the idea of being perpetually alone through the years and worry at the current and long-term implications of all this time spent outside the relationship cycle. The more certain I am that I have made the right decisions in my own life, the more wrong what is going on around me feels, and the more alien living here becomes. Combine the consumption orgy that is Christmas with the hard truth of another New Year and you create an inescapable gravity, pulling me closer to my worries and apprehensions than at any other time during the year. Winter becomes something of an emotional Summer with all its reflections, confusion, and uncertainty creating a conflagration which turns my mind to embers.
So have all these years been for naught? If I were to be struck dead today, do I go in peace, my mind, body, and spirit at ease with who and where I've been? Have I done the little guy looking out that window justice? Would he be happy with who I am? I think so, but I am not sure that I know so. I think he would be satisfied with who he became, if not necessarily overly excited by the idea of being an office drone who gets borderline emo every year around the end of December. He would dig the car and the motorcycle, certainly, but he wouldn't understand the worries. Time for him was an endless field ripe to be trod on, explored, rode over, and laid upon. Most girls he knew were a bother, so he didn't pay them much attention. For the most part, his world revolved around football, Nintendo, and play. School was a distraction, Santa was still out there bringing joy, and my bike had pedals.
In so many ways, all we will ever be is bigger, older versions of who we were in our youth. In one hand, I see something almost pathetic in that reality, but in the other I see an incredible potential for rediscovery. We have not run out of chances until we have surrendered up the last bit of our youthful imagination. Once that imaginative essence is gone, we are truly on our way to dying. If we embrace what it meant to be a child, we open up new opportunities for living. The key is finding people who inspire and share that vision. They are conspicuous in their rarity, if not their outright absence, in most of our lives. And that is where walking alone returns to the equation and I find myself back at the beginning of this circle.
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