Now and Then

   
If only I were younger, thinner, richer, more widely published, with somebody. If only I didn't have this physical pain. If only I were less impulsive, more matter-of-fact, more serene.  If only I had known then what I know now

But, of course, I have been younger, thinner, richer and completely without pain.  What about those days, what about then?  What were my "if only's" way back when?

What I desired then is not what I want now. Then, I wanted more patients, one more degree, way more excitement.  Now, I want a lot of what I do have....but I am still capable of nudging myself into what the Buddha would call a life of (relatively small) suffering by looking past my present to the uncharted future, to whatever is coming around the corner. Oh, then, then, then.

"Chronic anticipation", said aurhor Theodore Rubin, "is an attempt to control all of life's possible confrontations and makes it impossible to be peaceful or easygoing."  Well, I know that, and so do you. We all know that. But that doesn't keep us from anticipating more, more, more, or other, other, other.   Nor does all the literature, from the Greeks on up, that tell us to "Be here now", or --newer still - - tell us the importance of Mindfulness - - really get to one of the singular problems of being human. 

When Jim was reading Krishnamurti, he would often comment how Krishna would say that, while we call the past "the time before", and the future as "the time after", we can only go through it in time present.  "Truth," said Krishnamurti, "has no future, so path, no continuity."

If only I had been Krishnamurti. How glad I am that I was not.

When I think of the past, I realize how much change my friends and I have been through! Indeed, I notice that change is the predominent state.  If one arrests the flow for too long, the arrested moment is no good, is ridiculous, stops being remarkable. The rythm is destroyed. Change is the only territory there is.

I am in my late afternoon of life.  Carl Jung wrote about this state when he said, "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as thierto. But we cannot live the afternoon life life according to the program of life's morning: for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."

I don't have any great tips for stopping the kind of suffering that takes up so much useless space in our minds. And, as a therapist, I've rarely met anyone who is exempt from this type of thinking. Certainly, therapists are not. And neither, for the most part, is anybody else. maybe my Uncle Neil with the lobotomy. Maybe not. Every decade a new book is written about The Now and every decade each new book's author about The Now is congratulated as if they have discovered a brand new concept.  Stop comparing. Stop wishing. Stop thinking about the past. Stop worrying about the future.

Yoga? Meditation? Drugs? Bad habits? Healthy habits?

Forget going bra-less. Maybe we should go brain-less for awhile.  If only that would help.    
 

                                                  Two and a Half Years

Mountains shift, and so do relationshps. How is a relationshp lived? Month by month? Two and a half years is not a long time, not to me, who once was married for forty-three years. In a long term relationshp, there are so many two and a half years. No erosion, only differences and development.  Growth. Setbacks. Turns. Twists.  The years of lust and infatuation, the years of ecstasy, the years of not knowing, the years of coming to know,  the political years, the child raising years, the photography years, the academe years, the years filled with friends, the years losing friends and making new friends, the theatre years, the beach years, the years of being closed off, the years of opening back up, the years of turning to others, the years of returning to ouselves, the years of the bones, the years of writing,  the years of the body, the years of conversation,  the years of drama, the years of serenity, the years of solace, the years of youth, the years of aging, the years of family, the years of creativity, the years of building a business, the eyars of devotion, the years of illness, the years of flesh, the years of joy, the years of tears.

This is what a longterm relationship is like.  It is like Life. It IS life. And, it is time. In the end, Time is all we have.

How is two and half years lived?  In the body, in the fit of the body, in the feet, in the breathe,  in the sound of the voice, in the fit of the hand.I learned a new time to awaken and a new time to sleep. I learned a new type of sound. I learned new people: Star, Cousin George, who was inestimably well read and bright and enthusiastic about the life of the mind: who knows?  perhaps George is what the two and a half years was ultimately about.  George died, but so does everybody else. George died and the mountains shift.

Sometimes it only takes an instant.  Sometimes a day. Sometimes months, Sometimes, years.  In 1880 Edison patended the light bulb. In 1945, we got the Slinky and the bomb. In 1946 we got mobile phones. In Oklahoma last week, there was a tornado.

Books on relationshps talk about stability but there is no stability, only the ability to sustain uncertainty and change. Only the commitment to seek balance. Only the commitment to commit.  Ask the mountains about change. You can not push back the mountains and you can not redo a relationship. You can try (and I have tried) but mostly, barring a few wonderful couples I have known and still loved, it doesn't work.

Songs are filled with lyrics about time, change and regrets. Even two and half years can contain tons of Proustian bit of Time Remembered. When we went to New York. When we went to Jersey and walked the Boardwalk. When we attended his reunion.  When we saw the Broadway shows, when I had an anxiety attack in Times Square, when we heard Woody Allen play live, or Leonard Cohen sing, or Kris Kristofferson, or Bonnie Raitt or Mavis Sataples,   or we saw Alvin  Ailey's Revelation.  When we........when we.......when we........When we went to Lambeau Field and tears came to his eyes. And the Packer's won. And we couldn't find a decent green salad on the menu. 

Alan Ginsberg wrote an entire poem with one word: gone. Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.

 And more "gone's".So, if so much is gone, what lasts? What does one keep? The body doesn't know how to overthrow it's memory. It simply does not/can not. We are memory. Without our stories, we are not us. Even if we do not speak our memories, they remain, esconced in our muscles, in our unconscious,
A certain type of memory loss is always happening and another type never occurs.

Time.  "Sometimes I knew it would work out that way. Time is the great author. It always writes the pefect ending."
         - Charlie Chaplin, in the film Limelight

Is that true?  Have I just lived through another prefect ending? How come they all seem so incomplete?  What am I missing, some sort of Zen-ned out practice I don't care to spend the final years of my life learning?  My Uncle Neil didn't remember anything. He was given a lobotomy during the Second World War and he never looked all that happy to me. Was his a perfect ending?

Ah, but back to relationshps. Two and half years.  What is it?  What of it?  I can't speak to the person. I can't touch him. He is, as Ginsberg said it many times, gone. Many people in my life have been gone: my mother passed when I was twenty-five, my father when I was thirty-five, grandparents, of course, Jim -- my life, or so it seemes and now this.  And here I stand.  Neither a victim nor a soldier.  Repair takes place over time.  Nature hates a vacuum. Repair will take place.

And I will be old.

Still:  I hold out hope for me.

"And then there is the spring park,
damp as if freshly peeled, sweet
greenhouse, green cemetery with no
dead in it - - except, in some shaded
woods, under some years of leaves and rotted cnes, the body of a warbler
like a whole note fallen from the sky - - my old     
love for him, long a songbird's rib cage picked clean."
    -the poet Sharon Olds