I am 62.5 years old. I haven’t had a physical in over 10 years. We have no health insurance. But aside from a little flabbiness around the belly and other atrophic inconveniences, I’m in excellent health until they start looking, right? Well, my hearing sucks — genetics and too much rock & roll — but everything else works fine. You would kill for my blood pressure, for example.
The way I was raised caused me to postpone or avoid many of life’s potential accomplishments, yet I have a heart and a soul that seems to be quite strong. I’ve used them and Jungian analysis to go deeper into my own guts than I ever imagined was even possible, all this in the effort to understand and heal. I may be old and ugly, but I’ve never felt better inside. You do it your way, I’ll do it mine. This is the only path I’m aware of, so it must be the right one.
Writing is both an expression of my art and an illumination. Especially when blogging, something that happens almost instantaneously and often rashly, I quickly see my own complexes and neuroses writ large and clear. Afterwards, that is! This would scare a sane person away from the endeavor, but it dovetails nicely with the rest of my personal quest to open myself to love and giving. I’m learning more every single day about how reality works (the effect of thought and projection on the quantum field), and it’s about time. I have no idea what other people do with their lives, and living without producing a family of my own has left me often so self-absorbed that I end up hurting thousands of innocents along the way. Something else to be aware of and write about, no doubt. We all do this, of course, to one degree or another.
Finally paying attention to my wife’s needs (it’s only been almost 30 years!) is an entirely new area of life that’s opened up to me. My own “needs” are almost laughable by comparison. After all this time, all this suffering and joy, I feel a little lighter most of the time, like discovering some kind of glorious gift I didn’t know was there. I’m beginning to feel that absolutely everything is in my hands, and I never felt that way before in my life.
Maybe you have. If so, give yourself a pat on the back. Some of us take longer to bake!
All right, enough of this. It’s Sunday morning, I’m sitting here by myself, and this has been an unguarded moment of reflection. I trust it finds you hale and hearty, and now onward with the day.
Comment by K.J. Webb
1 February 24, 2008, 2:02 pm o'clock |
A mere pup, a mere pup. I speak from the lofty heights of 62.9125 sometimes tedious, sometimes exciting, years of age on the sometimes green, often distinctly gray crust of earth. When you get to be my age, old bean, we will compare notes. Seriously, John, reflecting on one’s own experience is really the best part of being alive, don’t you think? We’re put here - flung here, more like it - to try to figure things out, using what comes our way and, in our better moments, what we construct in our feeble noggins. It’s kind of odd to think that human beings didn’t really try to do this until somewhat recently in the pageant of history. Ordinary people didn’t anyhow. If you were a St. Augustine or an Aristotle, you might have a go at it. The folks you and I and almost everyone come from would have had their hands full digging peat moss from a bog or something of that sort. They’d have let the priests do the thinking for them. They might have had a little fun now and then whooping it up at the summer solstice, might have got some pleasure from fermented swill, might have periodically had a good roll in the hay, might even have looked at the sky from time to time with some wonderment. But nasty, brutish and short was the real story - and, if the fellow in the surplice was right, a long sleep in the clouds above or a good long roast on a spit down below (but who could know which?).
Keep on shakin’ and bakin’, my friend. All the hot air generated in all the ovens of all the souls who inhabit this tormenting planet is bound to produce a fully baked cake sometime or other. Give enough time to enough monkeys pecking at enough typewriters and, they tell us, the works of Shakespeare will turn up!