I think back to a weekend in 2009 where The Ravishing Mrs. TB and I took a weekend trip to Arizona to a conference for a then-company she was working for. It was the following week that I came home only to find out that Hammerfall, my layoff, was happening - and that our entire life would be upended.
Or I think back more recently to this year, when I was in Japan completely absorbed in training, thinking not a thing in the world about coming back and anything changing - only to get back to realize that I had A Sort Of Hammerfall, and that my entire career frame of reference would be changing.
I am very familiar with the "last time" a thing is going to happen. The last week of college, the last week before being married, the last day when the last day of the two week notice is reached, the last day before the first (or second or third) child arrives - all of these are times where something changes, and changes irrevocably. But these are always changes that are mentally known, planned for, managed. Yes, there is the same sense of before and after, but it it does not come as a surprise when the event occurs. One assumes, for example, that life is changing when one's first child arrives (by how much, you can never know until you do it).
But these other things - the layoffs, the unexpected separations and deaths, the sickness no-one saw coming but upends one's life - these are the things that part of me wonders if we do not realize the hidden joys or comforts we may have had prior to these events because we had come to accept them as normal and expected.
If they layoff in 2009 would not have happened - would I still remember it so clearly or that I had a good time, or would it simply become buried beneath the weight of other events that happened since then? And Japan - this year has become all the more precious because our training was canceled for the upcoming year. In some ways, could I have withstood A Sort of Hammerfall had I not had the experience of demonstrating at a 150 year old temple?
I write this at the beginning of what (at least in the U.S.) is considered the kick-off of the holiday season: Thanksgiving, Christmas (and Advent as well if you keep it), and New Year's. No-one can, I think foretell the future other than to say that in some definable and some indefinable ways, the Old World has passed away and we are in a transition to new one. I do not - at least here - pretend to know or predict what that is. Nor is that the point of this message.
Savor this time. Find joy in the season however you may - with family or friends, or even within your own heart. Sink into whatever joys the season may offer, even if in the back of your mind they may seem ephemeral. Breath deeply, hear the unheard, lock the scents of the season into your memory.
We do not know what the future will hold. But I deeply believe we will need that sense of strengthening before future appears.
The older I get the more my brain box shakes, rattles and rolls. It never stops. It always has to move, whether it’s prioritizing chores, processing the daily news, or just touring the blogs, or wrangling the dawgs, or...or...or...etc...
ReplyDeleteThe dawgs stopped me on our walk the other day to smell some yellow snow... and I shifted into a most curious mental idling neutral gear entirely by accident. It’s hard to describe what a profound experience it was. Kids were hooting and screaming at the rink.The wind was warm and pushing the gray clouds right along. The dawgs oinked and snuffled and marked their snowbank. There was no mental noise from the past, none from the future - just ambient neighborhood noise and the immediate present... and all was well. It’s hard to describe... I wonder if that is what they call “inner peace”?
For some reason I cannot force this mental state in any way...sometimes it just happens of its own accord.... and then only very rarely.
We are watching history, TB. If or when this all falls apart, and man’s natural state of ignorance and selfishness reasserts itself and dark times return... The Forty-Five will always be remembered as a place of introspection and inner peace, where a fella thought about the really important stuff and could focus on it. Kinda like that refreshing interlude by the yellow snow bank the other day.
Errrrrrr... that was meant as a heartfelt high compliment, friend. Have a great Tuesday.
Glen, I think inner peace can be many things to many people and is as ephemeral and undefinable to me as the color the sky makes just before it turns dark: neither blue nor green nor aquamarine but a combination of all of them. I can neither cause it to happen nor hold the moment, it just is.
DeleteGlen, if only one person (and that person is you at least) feel like this blog is a place that offers some level of introspection and inner peace, then the writing of it was and is completely worth it. It is a heartfelt compliment and I do take it as such. As long as I am able and whatever roving InterWeb censors do not prevent me, I will continue to do so.
Who knows? Maybe we can make the equivalent of InterWeb islands in a sea of Uncivilization, like the monasteries of Europe were.
It certainly does seem that memories are tied to noteworthy events. And the events of 2020 have been so fast and furious that rather than specific memories, they seem to have created a blur (to me.) I feel like we're on the brink of a new dark age. One that will be of such massively global proportions that it will set into motion a chain of unstoppable events. I don't know if there's any way to truly prepare for that.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, I was sort of feeling that it was just me. So many that I seem to be around see nothing but a better future ahead - from not just a single political or social ideology, I might add.
DeleteI always remember a line Gene Logsdon wrote about hitching up the horses in 1940 and only realizing later that it was the last time they did it that way. The War came, and the world changed. It feels like that.
The last four years were a breath of fresh air from the previous eight. They may be the last ones ever for this... place. Slipping into Venezuela... Crossing the Rubicon... Balkanization....
ReplyDelete"We do not know what the future will hold. But I deeply believe we will need that sense of strengthening before future appears." Amen and amen...
Time will tell, STxAR. That said, I honestly have very little hope that we will have nothing but the sort of things that destroys countries and cultures instead of strengthens them.
DeleteEvery the optimist, I don't feel any sense of doom or gloom with 2020. There have been hundreds if not thousands of events in our history where something happened to cause people to opine that the world has shifted in an unalterable way and yet they are now just a few lines in our history books, largely forgotten by those who do not read or study history. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, people's sense of security was instantly taken away and I'm sure they never saw the world in the same way again. And perhaps THEY were right. But their children and their grandchildren certainly didn't feel that way until perhaps 9/11 occurred. I know 9/11 took something from me that will never return but I know my daughter will never think about anything other than the few lines dedicated to the event in a history book.
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm saying events can affect people in profound ways but it can't reach into time. So because of that, "we" will still be here in the future probably worried about some current event than a few lines in a history book.
Ed, I appreciate you being the resident optimist. But I might offer a counter example. The incident that led to World War I created the situation that led to World War II, then to the Cold War and still in certain ways - the Balkans, Greece and Turkey - continues to play out today. The movement that Karl Marx started led to what is estimated at around 100 million deaths. In both of these cases, the events impacted and continue to impact not only the people that lived during them but our own very lives today. And while your daughter may not think any more about 9/11 than the few lines she reads, how we travel and how we effectively live in a surveillance society will be with her for the rest of her life.
DeleteWhile hundreds of events can be the stuff of history books, not all events are. And to those at the beginning of them, they may very well seem of little import or even benign.
I sure hope Ed is right, but I'm feeling the same as the others.
ReplyDeleteI hope Ed is as well sbrgirl. That said, like with most of these situations, it is relatively a wise idea to act as if it were not true.
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