For the longest time, I’ve just been sick.
Spiritually afflicted at the core, you core, you might say. Terminally depressed on a regular basis, crippled in relationships by paranoid projection, and always scared, taught from an early age to be afraid of art, sex, and love. To fear my very self, in other words. Whatever it is at the center of us that lets go when we need it, that’s what I learned to suppress. The way this happens is through withholding of affection and smothering of spirit. A child learns to be alert for signs of disapproval that mean abandonment, the grownup lives his life without ever shifting out of first or second gear. (That’s what happens when they run the wrong movie inside your heart, not the one you were born to live.) Frankly, with my background, I shouldn’t even be alive. That I indubitably am and have already accomplished a great deal (recognized or not), in spite of an ugly, lying burden I’ve lived most of my life believing to be normal, is something of a freaking miracle.
The oddest thing about my life, however, is that there seems to be no point to it, other than having all these things happen to me. Perhaps they are instructive, perhaps not. At any rate, it all changes in a nanosecond: right now the totality of my purpose in life is to sit in this chair on a Saturday afternoon in Taos, New Mexico and type on this laptop. Before you get to the end of the next sentence, I may have gotten another cup of coffee, the procuring of which will constitute the culmination of over 60 years of living on this Earth: it could be an act of cosmic significance for all humankind, just me getting coffee, or both. A butterfly in Ceylon might die as a result, and next week we all wake up with full telepathy. NOTHING IS “SOLID” OR SET IN STONE, absolutely nothing — and maybe that’s the point, except of course there isn’t one. A very good thing to keep in mind, regardless!
Having only recently made a tenuous connection to the Motherlode of Love that lifts us all (something that happens in a myriad of ways but usually at the outset through your parents’ beaming eyes), I see the things that might have been. I see another way. Not the easiest thing for a gray-haired dude to own, but there it is:
“Congratulations! You’re free to be the man you really are, and by the way, you’re almost DEAD!”
I would rather know than not know, certainly. And now there’s nothing left to do but not hold back, really not hold back, and kill the clock by living in the Now.
[to be continued very shortly...]
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It is never too late to discover, or attempt to discover, who you are. This is what our whole life is – self-knowledge, self-improvement – although, there are many who prefer to remain blind. Oh well, that’s their problem, not yours or mine. We’re doing good.
I agree! (Obviously…) You have it exactly right, which is why you will sell me a house someday.
At least I know what I missed and why. Now I have the id of a 20-year-old blended with the wisdom of experience in the body of a relic. Things could be worse.