Playing for Time

So many questions… so much time… so few answers. The days are long, and rife with opportunities to think, which has never intimidated me but there’s so much more to think about now. I had grandparents who told me stories to which I listened like my life depended on it… and there have been times it has. They were all born in the 1800s except for one grandmother, the kid in the crowd, and they experienced a lot of things so we wouldn’t have to, such as life without A/C, motor vehicles, or consumer-protection laws. They knew things… and it’s taking me this long to catch up. My attentive listening lacked meat on its bones… life experiences to flesh out the facts simmering in my subconscious. Those necessary learning opportunities did come along, bit by bit, as they will, providing what feels like a unique perspective but is instead universal, I’m pretty sure.

Let’s do a quick checklist and see where we are, just out of curiosity. Raise your hand, nod your head, blink twice, say a rosary, whatever’s most affirming, for each thing you identify with as I blurt it out:

• Planet Earth seems to be out of control
• because it always was
• but this feels excessive. Like disastrously crazy off the wall.
• Is that why I feel sad and tired all the time? Do you feel sad and tired a lot?
• Do you wonder when [if] this sensation of living in a state of limbo will end?
• Do you miss the Before time when we knew less about our neighbors and family members?
• And that was a good thing?
• Do you think about your life and wonder what it’s all meant? Or is the point, as someone said yesterday, simply to live?
• Were there things said to you by older people that seemed clear enough at the time… but you didn’t actually have a clue? And if you consider yourself to be “getting older” now, are some of those things becoming starkly real? Do you feel the parameters shifting?

One of my grandmas told me when she was in her 80s that her life had become very lonely. Our family spent as much time with her as we could, but I know we didn’t touch that existential loneliness that assails the human spirit. She’d outlived all of her German cousins and most of her friends… no one shared a past history with her… all her reference points were changing. As her granddaughter, consumed with my own life, I couldn’t begin to reach in and touch that sense of unease, alienation… solitude. But I do get it now.

A dear friend the other day was relating a dream whose meaning was too-easily discerned, and I said to him “There is no lonelier proposition than human existence, even with someone we nearly worship living right beside us.” Our minds and spirits take us to far places where no one can accompany us, and we wrestle with each of those worlds alone. The truth that “we are born alone, we die alone” becomes clearer as we go along… nobody can really tag along on those two trips, nor during much of the in-between. As Uncle Walter Cronkite might say, “That’s just the way it is.”

As the physical healing proceeds, I’ve been coming up with ways to feel not productive but useful, big difference. It’s still in the “I could” stage, but the ideas themselves build a sense of hope, which we can’t live without. And it helps keep the big shaggy hound from the door… the one that creeps in, sits on your chest in the dark, stares you down, and beats you with the awareness of your own empty solitude. So… what are you looking at this morning that seems insurmountable? Or merely annoying beyond words? What one thing could you change that would start to make a difference? Go get another cup of coffee, think about the question(s), write down whatever goes through your mind, reread it over the next few days… see what happens. Lemme know. Please.

Existential loneliness has been momentarily banished this morning by sunshine after rain, a peaceful house, and a breakfast of cheesy scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. It’s the little things. Make your weekend restful, healing, and fun.