Saturday, October 08, 2022

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.


6 comments:

  1. Filthie8:44 AM

    Some mile posts in life, ya gotta stop the car, get out, take pics, and savour the atmosphere and surroundings. Others… you put the pedal to the metal, and blow past them as fast as you can. Losing a father is not one of the ones I want to dwell on but everyone is different. Stay as long as ya want, TB. It’s not a race, and sometimes there’s important things to be learned by sticking around.

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    1. Glen, it is a vista point at a fork in the road. I need to be patient with myself and look at the view before I zoom off. I have a tendency to go too quickly.

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  2. You wrote my last 30 months in this post. I'd love to have a place to go where it's easier to function. Most of my family is here. But they keep to themselves, so it's kind of moot to be this close just for that reason. But this doesn't strike me as the time of life for me to pull stakes and ride away. Therefore:

    As you said, time is really moving, the tunnel is coming, and it'll scrape of what is hanging over the sides. That maybe painful if forced on you, but if you do the pruning yourself, you may be less likely to have a "radical amputation". Jesus Himself told us that if a part offends us, to remove it. I don't think that was a call to self-mutilation, but a good picture of living with purpose.

    Your blog has really shown me that I lived a lot like water runs. Easing down the path of least resistance. But the old adage, "an unexamined life isn't worth living" really has been making more and more of a difference in me. And I'm finally throwing open ALL the cupboards to evaluate, but trying to do just a little at a time to not be overwhelmed....

    Thank you for putting this out for us to read. It is making a difference in the way I live. Thank you for the illumination.

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    1. STxAR - I am glad that in some way my musings are helpful - every author wants to know that some level, they are contributing something to their writing.

      I tend to be somewhat of "path of least resistance" fellow as well. And often that works, right up until the path of least resistance is maybe not the one I should be following. As you say, open the cupboards - but slowly, one at a time.

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  3. Perhaps it is my optimism speaking, but whenever I look back at similar crossroads in my life, they seem pretty trivial with several years of hindsight though I know at the time they appeared to be more monumental. So with that in mind, I just plow ahead knowing that someday this current monumental change in my life will appear trivial, just like all the ones that preceded it.

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    1. Ed, if I consider my own life, there are two sorts of decisions. The first are exactly as you state. The second are the ones that ended up being monumental, but I did not think about them the way I should have. They may turned out "okay", but not necessarily ideally.

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