“Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is lie long enough.” Groucho Marx
A couple of mornings ago, I was sitting here and thinking. Now, before I go one word further, that sentence could open every story and I don’t think I’ve ever used it before. I was thinking about my life and how it is now that I reside in OctoLand.
I am writing to you about what it feels like describing a place you haven’t been, looking for language you can understand. Whenever I start one of these things, it kind of lingers around the borders of my consciousness, very often only one thought away. I bumped into a quote credited to Kierkegaard. Now, I know of him, but little else and I am not going to be an instant AI wonder and check him out. My stories are convoluted enough and pretending to know about people I don’t, doesn’t help.
“Life is understood backward, although we must live it forward.” When I read his quote, my first thought was I wish I had thought of that, because it is perfect, almost perfect. For the record, I started writing this story before reading the quote, so I can at least take credit for that. It is a very optimistic sentiment, especially when it comes to understanding our past, which is really our life’s work, going back there from here, without losing our place.
I am not sure if there is a more fluid concept than time. You can slow it down. You can speed it up. You can’t stop it, although it will eventually stop you. For a while, birthdays can feel like accomplishments and they’re numbers you look forward to. This is when you close your eyes, blow out the candles and make a wish for tomorrow, which can become yesterday very quickly, especially when you are not paying attention.
I am a bunch of paragraphs in and I haven’t told why there is a story in here, somewhere. I have been living a kind of unscheduled life these days. Unlike the birthday boy, closing his eyes and blowing out the candles, I am keeping mine open and enjoying the circle of inhalation and exhalation. My real estate is shrinking and where I have come from impacts my view. The less I have, the better I seem to be able to see. I have so many yesterdays and most important about it all, is the fact that nothing stays the same, not even our backwards understanding.
I am 80 years into this dance and I can now start a day and have no idea what moves to make. This is a quiet privilege and that’s when it hit me, I have earned it! It is puberty’s book end, understood, but a bitch to explain. Yes, I am living forward, but I got a closetful of history and everything that has ever happened to me is how I clothe myself each moment going forward.
Somewhere along the line and I am not quite sure where or when, my life transmission went from automatic to manual. I think about the gears now and try to have a smooth ride. I suppose when the “rest of my life” went from being a concept to something quite tangible, I wanted my hand on the gear shift. I needed to feel the road, a totally unfamiliar terrain these days, now that the future has caught up with me.
When I first started inquiring into Zen, the whole idea of impermanence really made an impact. My first lonely night occurred a little before my 10th birthday. I was awakened by the scream of my mother, when she received the news that her husband, my father, had died in the hospital. Back then, a heart attack would likely kill you, because treatment was not as sophisticated as it is today.
The idea of coming to terms with our own mortality was only part of its way of looking at the world. Constancy is an illusion, a way to maintain order, even though it changes from one breath to the next. We love getting attached to things, as if they are some antidote to avoid the inevitable. Over time, I began to understand the way things are and the lengths we will go to mask them. In OctoLand, there are no masks in stock and inner vision begins to improve as the eye chart shrinks in size, at least that’s the hope for us.
Some of these days, it feels like a have parachuted into my life and I am behind enemy lines. The way to avoid capture is to always keep one hand on that recently, acquired gearshift. Doing what I want, simply because I want to, is new, at least the rationale for it is. Thinking about what my close personal friend, Kierkegaard, had to say, is like a spiritual seasoning. These 80 years of mine have earned me the right to live forward with more freedom, savoring moments and understanding their singularity, as the past keeps getting clearer and clearer.
In a way, all our time here is borrowed and the terms of each deal are in much larger hands than my own. When we go, no matter the circumstance, there are no pockets to carry anything forward. The objective is to lighten the load before check in. The mind and the heart are the conductors on this journey, first day to last. I finally get to ride in first class. The fare is 80, non-refundable years. I am doing my part to slow the ride as the track ahead begins to mist into the clouds.
When I began this story a handful of days ago, I wasn’t sure where it was going to go. Just like you, my life is still a work in progress. My vantage point is different than most of yours in terms of longevity. The past and the future connect for a split second in the present, one grain of sand squeezing through the neck of the hour glass. No matter where you are on the calendar, awareness provides the clarity for going forward, one grain of sand at a time.
Maybe that’s what I’m talking about.
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https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/17757424-accrued-and-earned