THE VIEW FROM WHERE I SIT
They say the further forward you go, the further back you can see. This assumes that everything behind you hasn’t been erased or eradicated in some fashion.
I little over a year ago, as my wife and I were going through a house search for the purposes of downsizing, I randomly went onto an app and looked up my childhood home. This 3BD, 1BA, 1356 SQ FT house my parents purchased for $13,900 in 1957 and in which they raised 4 children, sold for half a million dollars. It’s the same address but when I look at the pictures, it’s not the same house.
My favorite pizza place, family owned for 60 years, is now up for sale. Perhaps it will be purchased by someone with the appreciation of its importance to the community. I just read today my elementary school is no longer going to exist. Uncertain if it is to be torn down or turned into apartments or condos.
So, you have to be a realist and hold on to your memories. How long will that last? Reading about the horrors of dementia and Alzheimer’s, you shudder to think you will lose all you ever had.
You get to be a certain age and people want you to focus on your future, your retirement plans, how will you afford, well, to live. I’ve been doing that for the last six or seven years. I’m focused. I’m aware. I plan. But what of today?
No, I am not advocating hedonism by any means. But when you consider all you have been through in life and the uncertainty of what is to come, there is nothing wrong with paying attention to the here and now. What some will call “being in the moment.”
Too much of my life is a routine. Waking up at a given time, morning schedule, going to work, fixed breaks and lunches, home to make dinner, maybe find time to write or read. It’s unavoidable. Life revolves around work.
Ok, but like the Stoics say, all you can control is your response to things that happen. If I simply look at everything fresh and new, it does not become stale and worn. Emerson’s quote comes to mind in this regard:
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
I really try to make each day fresh and new. I try not to be what someone else expects of me but the honest and true version of who I am. The version it has taken me sixty years and counting to become. I live for my expectations, not others. I am not shedding the skin of the past; it is disappearing slowly of its own due course. I have hopes for the future, plans for it, but can’t control it beyond my meager means.
Ah, but let us talk about now. Right now. This moment. Sit a spell with me. I’ll wait.
