Fog ... Terra Incognita ... and Satori ....

Shinto "floating" Torii at Itsukushima, Miyajima Island, Japan

Sometimes it's hard to talk about significant, delicate issues. Sometimes it's hard to read about them. Sometimes it is hard to open (or carry on) a discussion of potentially touchy subjects many of us would prefer remain in abeyance. This is one of those times ... one of those subjects ... one of those posts ... and no, it's not about politics.... (grin)

Visualize (from memory or imagination): A nebular dreamscape ... a familiar, generic metaphor for our inescapable yet existential lifescape. We are alone in the scene, of course, conscious on some deeper level of the essentially solitary nature of our being, though we know there are others, kindred souls and spirits ... and perhaps others not so kindred ... out there somewhere. Imagine the landscape in chiaroscuro ... "the middle ground between light and shadow" (with a nod to Rod Serling) ... pallid sunlight giving way to shade, shadows fading to deepest ebony, bordered by gray moist curling tendrils of mist and fog ... not unlike the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett realizes that she is really in love with ... has loved all along ... her long-suffering knight errant Rhett Butler ... and she runs to him through a clinging, clutching, grasping fog ... only to learn after her harrowing sprint that he really no longer gives a damn, and that her enlightening epiphany has come too late. But I digress....

Each of us has traversed such fog ... or experienced the sensation of being resident in a camera obscura ... alone and vulnerable, enveloped in suffocating darkness, the world tilted crazily ... flashing from light to dark, or dark to light, and back again. You look for familiar landmarks to show the way or mark the path. Behind you, a sound ... what???? You turn and look, but there is nothing there ... or at least your eyes fail to register another presence.... But...? You stop for a minute, listening, straining for any sound in the half-light ... but there is nothing.... Is it nothing?

You walk on, reluctantly but ineluctably quickening your pace, listening.... There ... again.... A quick succession of small sounds, stopping you in your tracks ... and freezing those echoing, trailing steps in the same moment. Something is there ... something is stalking you ... unknown but implacable. You resist the urge to call out "Hello?" because maybe it hasn't seen you, doesn't yet know that you are ahead. And if somehow you've escaped its notice, you don't want to draw its attention....

Rooted to the spot, you strain your eyes, your ears, all your senses ... something (what? what?) just outside your ken. Waiting.... You move, oh so slowly, cautiously, deliberately ... feel inside your pockets, your purse ... is there any small protection, some beneficent talisman, you might find there? Finally, whistling through the unseen graveyard, muttering incantations against the darkness, you casually saunter away ... then moving faster, faster.... And the sound ... now just behind you, so close ... your mind leaps, your heart pounds ... and your brain sends the message to your feet that they should be pounding too ... get away ... get away ... but you are transfixed ... and that sound, that thing, is coming closer. You don't know if it's something good or bad ... you just know that it's unknown ... and you must find safety, escape, surcease.... Where is home? Your car? Perhaps you can swiftly drive away before it catches you.... Where is safety? What is safe? Where ... and who ... are you???



Top of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, in the fog

There! At the signpost up ahead ('nother nod to Rod) ... that thing ... that stalker ... pursuing you so relentlessly through the fog.... You see it now ... in the mirror ... just over your shoulder ... under your eyes.... Agggghhhhh!

It's age!!!! And anyone reading this blog, this post, will have at least made its acquaintance, if not be (literally) old and comfortable friends with it by now.

Inescapable Truth: Age happens, people ... except to those who in the alternative die tragically young, perhaps leaving a beautiful corpse, but with so much of life and its promises unfulfilled. We can't change it, or bargain with it (Dorian Gray and his portrait notwithstanding), or finesse the game. It comes to (and for) all of us. The best we can do is make peace with it ... accept it as a gift that we have been given ... learn to laugh at the vicissitudes it unrelentingly visits upon us and the life lessons it insists we learn.

As I muse on these things (and play with the words), I wryly recall two specific times in my life when I was suddenly, without preface or real warning, confronted with the fact that I was actually getting older ... like my parents ... like my grandparents (eeeek!) ... that I would not somehow magically live forever, glowing with the light (and blissful ignorance) of youth. (Note: when I graduated from CHS, my grandparents were 63 years old, having been born in 1900. I will be 62 in October.)

I remember my first "awakening" so well. I was 24 years old, working at Crawford & Company in Dallas and three of us were "eating in" on that particular day. My co-worker Carolyn was two years older than I, but we had lived through adolescence during the same time and had much shared cultural experience. The other girl was Tracy, recently hired at the company just out of high school ... probably 18 years old. I can see us so clearly, sitting around the table eating our sandwiches, Carolyn and I dominating the conversation with a lot of "Do you remember...?" Poodle skirts ... Elvis Presley on Ed Sullivan's show (where he was cropped at the waist to keep our parents from getting All Shook Up) ... Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard and the Platters ... "Your Hit Parade" and the early days of "American Bandstand" with Justine and Bobby and Arlene and Kenny ... bobby socks ... saddle oxfords ... penny loafers ... rolled up blue jeans ... doing "The Stroll" and "The Twist" and "The Watusi" ... back-combed bubbles with velvet bows....

Dick Clark, American Bandstand

Carolyn and I were rapid-firing memories back and forth, laughing and having a great time ... and then I looked over at Tracy, and she was sitting there with her mouth open, eyes wide, looking at the two of us like we had just beamed down from the Starship Enterprise ... listening to us reminisce about things of which she had no knowledge and absolutely no frame of reference. And I remember thinking ... so distinctly ... "My God, I'm getting old!" Strange new thought.... Brave new world.... And then I put the idea out of my mind, as some anomalous and not very welcome spectral visitor ... and resumed the conversation.... And it was about four years before I revisited that terra incognita....

In October 1975, I had my 29th birthday ... I cannot say I celebrated it ... and it was the most depressing birthday I have ever had. I recall so clearly being morose for that entire year before I mercifully turned 30 and extricated myself from the grip of that wretched, stifling malaise. No matter how I tried to look at it ... no matter that I told myself I was being totally ridiculous and melodramatically melancholy ... no matter that I joked about "considering the alternative" ... and despite Yahn's bemused but unwavering, loving support ... I felt despondent every time I thought about the fact that I was 29!

Age 29 marked a fundamental shift in my vision of myself as a young person ... an immortal youth. After the 29th, reaching 30 was (for me) a piece of cake. And I have sailed through all of the other yearly milestones that resonate more deeply with others, or strike some with particular force and poignancy. I've heard from many people over the years that their 30th birthday was particularly difficult ... or their 40th ... or their 50th ... need I mention the 60th .. and beyond?

I know that many of you have your own stories to share, of your own intimations of mortality and maturity ... and we would love to hear from you about your own moments of truth and clarity ... the birthdays or other days that affected you in meaningful ways, that caused you to confront your advancing age ... whether those days were hard, or sobering, or funny ... the life lessons you learned, the insight you gained, and anything else about your significant days or moments in time.

As we racket noisily and sometimes bumptiously through the fog of life, we are blessed to find others who ease our passage, who care, who quiet our souls and soothe our minds with compassion and empathy ... "fellow travelers" to borrow a phrase which had an entirely different meaning in a very different time long, long ago. Many of us have (or had) supportive spouses or significant others, most of us have children, we all have friends ... but, but ... we also have each other.

We were classmates 45+ years ago at Childress High School ... diverse and distinct, yet bound then as now by commonalities of life experience and history. And we are still classmates in the science lab of life ... ... sometimes poking and dissecting and analyzing each other ... but also supporting and reaching out to each other as we together tend the Bunsen burner to light our way through the darkness. (I don't think until I wrote these lines that I ever imagined seeing life as analogous to dead and dismembered frogs in Richard Couch's Biology class ... but sometimes you just go where the metaphor leads you.)

When I think of the passing of time, and of life, of the days figuratively growing shorter in the "autumn of our years", I am reminded of Shakespeare's words (spoken by Lysander) in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night.

Lysander was speaking of true love that "never did run smooth" ... but I believe the words are equally applicable to life itself. "Life is short" is more than just a cliche. It is a cautionary bedrock truth ... otherwise it would never have made it to the status of "cliche". We are all in transit on the journeys of our lives; we laugh, we love, we have days of unalloyed joy, and nights of peace and serenity, and times of trial and stabs of pain and sadness and regret. In other words ... we live ... and if we are aware, we learn to cherish our families and friends, and nurture and grow our knowledge for use in lives to come. And eventually ... through the years, through the lives, if we are lucky and introspective and wise, we reach the state the Japanese call satori ... enlightenment. Or, as Tan Twan Eng wrote in The Gift of Rain:

... for the briefest moment I saw how everything and everyone and every time was connected in some manner. A golden light brighter than the sun filled my room, and it was all so very clear, so lucid, that I let out a soft sigh and closed my eyes, hoping to capture it in the memory of my heart. I felt completely at peace, ascending higher and higher in an all-encompassing understanding. I saw it all, everything, from beginning to end and then to a new beginning again. And after a moment of eternity it was gone, that complete clarity and total contentment, and though I did not know it then, I would search for it for the rest of my life....

Endo-san stared at me with unmoving eyes. "Satori," he wispered.

Satori, indeed....

)O(