Month: January 2023

What does it mean

“What does this mean?” she asked, paging through page after page.

“It’s a book, a journal of some sort,” mansplained her companion.

“That’s obvious,” she said, rolling her eyes. “But what does it mean?”

“It means he was arrogant enough to write down his thoughts and ideas for a posterity that doesn’t care one whit,” he said.

“Or he wanted to record his thoughts and ideas in hopes his future self would understand and remember and know what to do with them,” she said more optimistically.

“Maybe that’s why anybody writes anything: In hopes the people of the future will remember and understand and know what to do,” he said.

“That makes a kind of sense,” she said.

“Of course it does,” he said smugly. “I said it.”

She laughed at that, and he liked the sound of her laugh, and they set the old book aside and kept walking, a step ahead of where they had been before they found the book.

As in the instant

Sometimes I eye myself in the mirror and see my father looking back at me. Other times it’s one of my brothers. Silly, of course: It’s really me. But I see the family resemblance.

I’m spending quite some time today thinking about the passage of time. Time doesn’t actually pass — it’s always now. We can describe what just happened or what happened a long time ago, but the description will be filtered through now, as it has to be, because there’s only now. Any recording or recollection is necessarily not as good as in the instant.

It’s all one journey, from waking consciousness, to awareness of consciousness, to learning to walk, and moving about. We touch base with our memories and compare notes with other people, but it’s all one journey of awareness and discovery.

Oh, how profound and pretentious I sound, as if disclosing a secret of the universe newly unearthed. What fools we mortals be — and all these years later, I have a new understanding of what old Will meant when he wrote that line. I am an old dog still learning very old tricks in hopes of mastering them someday.

Still me

I know my back aches more than it used to. I know sometimes I pause in mid-sentence because I just can’t think of the right word and I know the word has come to my mind dozens if not hundreds of times before. I know I have to stop and sit more often when I am walking or doing physical work — and speaking of walking, I know I’d rather not run anymore, even if I’m in a hurry.

And yet I’m looking out at the world with the same consciousness that looked out at the world to find Spider-Man #4 in a pile of other comic books for sale in the summer of 1963. These are the same fingers and arms that held a woman for the first time in the 1970s with all the wonder and delight that can mean. I am still the young man who watched, fascinated, as stupid people hurled eggs at a stage in Oshkosh because they didn’t like what Mr. Reagan was saying about freedom and tyranny. Of course my opinions and frame of mind have changed in all these years, but it’s still me.

I look in the mirror and see the same person who looked in the mirror and saw an underweight tall drink of water, even though now I see an overweight old man with a beer belly.

All I’m trying to say is that the externals have changed and quite a few points of view have changed — although I still believe Reagan was right when he said government IS the problem — but the consciousness that powers these fingers across the page and sees and hears the world around it is still the same consciousness, even if it doesn’t see or hear as clearly as it did back in olden times.

We only get one body and one consciousness in this lifetime, and we’re stuck with them for a very long time, so it’s best we take care of them and feed them right and use them with as much wisdom as we can muster.