Time Alone And Choices

Funeral preparations are largely complete:  Songs have been selected, pictures prepared for scanning, speech drafted, pastor spoken to about the order of service.   The other items - venue, flowers, after-event meal, interment, gravestone - have all been ably (and thankfully) addressed by my sister and The Outdoorsman.

My part was supposed to take two days.  It really only took five hours.  What this left me with was a lot of memories from walking through almost 60 years of photos, and time to think.

I alluded earlier this week that one of the reasons I write is because it is free, therapy is expensive, and frankly I do not think I would get more out one than the other.  Writing at least lets me throw my thoughts out on paper, to puzzle over and think on as the day goes by.  The same is true of the journal I keep (and have kept for over 30 years - I write, and then I wrestle.  

The joy of this week, the bane of this week, is that I have had the overlay of time and history on top of it.  And all of this is screaming out to me from my writings and my musings as I, in an unusual and meaningful way, walked through my own history.

It is no secret to those that read here regularly that I have apparently reached a crossroads of life, being driven  towards some sort of future choice - a choice which I am in some ways very aware of, but in other ways vaguely aware of.  A lot has changed in the past two years; a lot is changing in the next year.  And as I considered my life at the moment, what I find is a series of overlapping layers of things, feelings, people, and practices, all in some way having some importance - but not all the same importance, and perhaps not all even needing to be pulled into this next phase of life.

It is like the growth of English as I remember it from an textbook:  originally came the root Old English itself, which was then overlaid in time by Latin, Norse, Norman, French, Greek, and then the world as history went on and different influences reached England.  In the modern practice of English, we by default drag all of that history around with us.  And while it is easy to make a personal choice to "avoid" modern English in choosing older words - like "trow" in place of "believe", as it "I trow I have a choice to make" - it is a great deal more difficult to sift through our lives with clarity of choice and in some cases, the ability to select.

Some of this is fundamental to the basics of life, I suppose:  What am I doing?  Why am I doing this?  Why did I start doing this?  Perhaps more importantly, why should I continue doing this?  And that extends not only to activities but to people, relationships, geographic locations, even personal beliefs.

This is an application I think of the concept of "Zero Sum Thinking":  if I were to restart this thing - be it an activity, a relationship, a belief, a practice, a place to live - from scratch without any prior investment in it, would I?  And if not, why am I do it now (the answer there, of course, is often sheer inertia)?  

Commit, decisions, choices - these are the words that keep coming up to me as sat and thought and looked.  It is as if I am getting squeezed into a chute, knowing that things will have to pop off of the pack but not having any idea which or what to pop off - or avoiding the decision altogether.

The reality that haunts me however, is that time is marching on.  In point of fact, that time frame of a year from now is coming not more quickly than I imagine (I understand how quickly time moves), but inexorably.  And if I want to have clarity then, things need to start clarifying now.