I was at church the other Sunday (what can I say, I'm an inveterate experimenter; also, it was a UU church and I don't think you can lose your Jew card for that) and the part of the sermon that grabbed me was about creation. "I was looking out at the mountains, thinking about how I would've liked to be around for the creation of this beautiful landscape... and then I realized I was. The mountains were crumbling in front of me and becoming new mountains, beautiful ones."
In other words, every end is a beginning. The world wasn't created and left to decay; it's still being created. It's probably too naïve to try and claim that it's all equally beautiful, that a burn scar is as beautiful as a forest or a cloud of dust as beautiful as a solar system. But though entropy may win out in the very long term, on a scale as small as my life there is no necessary downward trend.
I have a bad habit of holding on to the past. I want to sleep in the bed I slept in as a child and watch Sesame Street again even though I already know how to count. I want to keep friends forever and have them stay the same forever. I want to have all my old boyfriends back. Maybe take them back to the places where we had really good sex, so we could have that same sex again. I'm twenty-four years old and I'm already obsessed with reclaiming what's gone--heedless of what might be coming.
It can never be the same. The wind has blown, the dust has shuffled, my old life is never coming back. My life as of last week is never coming back. I've known this for a long time, but what I'm only just learning is that "you can't go home again" isn't just true; it's good! Because I have a new home, and the more time I spend pouting around my old stomping grounds, the less I have for living in my life now. Is this the best life I've ever had? That's an utterly academic question. It's the best life I have now and it doesn't suck.
Not that everything old must be thrown away. If an old friend is still my friend, or a friend from the past comes back, thank God for that! But thank God for the friend, not for the oldness.
So yeah, I should probably go on new dates more often.
Nicely put.
ReplyDeleteDon't know what that's like. My entire life has pretty much been "meh", "do not want!", or "friends? what are those?"
ReplyDelete...Also with the possible exception of my early 20s, entropy has been beating the crap out of my life.
ReplyDeleteNot Me - You can do something about it. I don't know you, I don't know your situation or disadvantages, but I believe it's possible for anyone with a small amount of voluntary motor control to improve their life. If you have what it takes to complain on my blog, you have what it takes to form a little more human connection or joie de vivre than you've got now. Get on it.
ReplyDelete. . .
ReplyDeleteI had a dream last night where I was taking care of a small tree which was becoming progressively more damaged, and I would work constantly to try and repair it. Every now and then I would be forced to take a short break due to exhaustion, but it was never as in good of shape as it was before the last break. And after each break was over, it was in much worse shape, and I had to go about repairing it again... during some breaks, I asked others for help, but the only results were either refusal or useless commentary intended to be "advice". Later in the dream, things started getting ever more ridiculous; at the very end, the tree had its branches broken short to a few inches, the lower half of the trunk and roots had vanished entirely, and it was planted upside-down. (No, I didn't do any of those things, they just happened on their own somehow when I wasn't looking.)
Latest significant event in real life - temperature's been 35-40 degrees F, furnace is broken, repair company won't fix furnace without apartment manager's permission, manager has been balking at granting permission for days, blah blah blah technical and legal complications out the wazoo. Will be buying a space heater tomorrow because I don't know when this will be resolved, even though I probably can't really afford the time or money to do so.
"Trying" isn't good enough when nobody and nothing will cooperate.
(this message was composed and edited over a period of nearly 2 hours during "downtime" moments while I was working online. This is normal for longer messages.)
Okay, no more hijacking your blog.