Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.”

—Mignon McLaughlin, The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I’ve been trying to dig myself out of the mounds of acquired stuff that have begun to seem more a burden than preserved treasures. Part of this has been cleaning up and getting rid of old paper files and odds n’ ends in filing cabinets and boxes. Sometimes I actually throw them away; sometimes I digitize them then throw them away. Other times I run across relics of my past that aren’t really worthy of preservation—except, maybe, as personal historical documents. Signs and portents from a much younger me which now and then have messages for the present.

I came across one of those today, something written on a scrap of paper when I was about fourteen or fifteen. There was some scribbling in imitation of a novel called Jesus Christs by A. J. Langguth that made a big impression on me back then. Not great writing on my part, but I find it as hard to be disdainful of that child who was me as I would find it impossible to be disdainful of any fourteen or fifteen-year-old child trying to find their way in the creative world. I will digitize this page, even though it isn’t “worthy.”

We need to protect our young selves because they still exist inside us, still need to be nurtured and told it’s okay to come out of hiding. They are part of us, no matter how we may deny them or what sophisticated masks overlay their faces.

On the bottom of this same preserved page was another message, scrawled in a different pen and in obvious distress—not the fat, rounded characters of my “artistic” handwriting.

Why am I so cruel and impatient? He’s old and needs help. He needs someone to listen to his stories and make him feel good.

That one sent a chill through me. That young girl was speaking of her biological father, already a senior citizen when she was born. What chilled me? It made me realize that my life has been bracketed by the care and consideration of two old people. When I was young, my father—much older than my mother, and now, of course, as the wheel turns round and round…it’s my mother.

In between these brackets existed a time for me, a precious and fleeting time, but I didn’t realize that. I piffled it away, had some fun, worried too much about inconsequential things, thinking my time infinite and solely my own. I don’t believe I’m alone in this kind of behavior, this illusion, as many a human seems incapable of grasping the passage of time. I have done a lot of gazing in crystal balls in the course of my life, consulting with the tarot and the runes and the lines in the palm of my hand. I got quite good at telling fortunes. I could really sell it, you know? Weave a good story for the marks…

Like many and many a fortune, my own held good and bad, steady going and crumbling steps, the expected and unexpected—none of which, really, was picked up by the crystal or the cards or the lines or the runes. Like many and many a future, mine held a large dose of irony that oracles seem very poor at ferreting out of the aethyr.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I wasn't going to do a year-end post because I wasn't sure I had a good way to encapsulate what went on with me this year. But, as so often happens, sartorias showed me a way into the subject. So, thanks Sherwood. :-) As they say in the disclaimers, she is not in any way responsible for the misuse I put her prompting to.

What did you learn this year? she asked her blog readers.

"Everything and nothing," I wrote in the comments. "Outwardly, my life is still boringly the same, but I did some important shifting internally. Too much to encapsulate—or, at least, most of it is ongoing and hard to encapsulate. But the most important two, the ones that I can make out through the fog: learning to let go, and learning not to give up. I mean, really learn, internalize, not just give mouth space to."

I don't mean to sound preachy here. That's not at all my intent. Mostly I'm reinforcing for myself what I've learned, reminding myself. Because you can't reinforce lessons learned enough—at least I can't. They have a tendency to slip away from me, even after I think I've got them.

I learned this year that sometimes when you let go of something—really, honest-to-G(g)od(dess) let go—you release it into the Universe, and sometimes, sometimes the Universe calls your bet and sends it back to you in a new and improved form. I learned that sometimes the things we want most, even things we've spent years yearning for, are not the most important things. In fact, sometimes we're denied getting them in direct proportion to how much we want them. They begin to control us, our thoughts and actions, our worldview, and nothing should have that kind of power over us.

But letting go...oh my Great Golly, that's the hardest part. Getting to a place of Non-attachment to something we've focused so much energy on feels near impossible. There's a lot of pain involved in that struggle, and I could no more give you a step by step analysis of how it works than I could fly backwards around the moon and do a pirouette on the head of a pin. Mostly, I think, it's a question of going into the darkness, living there for awhile, and crawling back out again.

"Use your dark times," a wise friend once told me. "Don't run from them. Don't live with them. Let them tell you what they have to say, then walk away." Sometimes not always easy to do in practice, and if you need help walking away from them, take it. But I'm not someone who thinks we need to run from unhappiness at the first instance or medicate ourselves away from it at every turn. Dark has as much to teach us as light.

The other lesson of the year is, ironically, one in not giving up. We give up in all sorts of ways, little and big, not just giving up dreams and wishes. Every time we decide it's too much trouble to do something or take the easier, lesser way, it's a form of giving up. After awhile, these acts of giving up pile around us like wood on a pyre and if we're not careful, our lives are consumed. Or, rather than a fire metaphor, maybe I should use ice. Because that's how it was for me: my life became frozen.

So, bend over and pick the soda bottle off the sidewalk and throw it in the trash rather than walking by and leaving it for someone else; go for that walk; look at that old story idea one more time; take a chance on the nice man who asked you out for coffee...

I don't make resolutions, but my hopes for the new year are that I keep learning, and that I remember, remember well, what I've already learned.

Have a blessed New Year, everyone.