Approaching 40
All is Not Quiet on Veteran's Morn.
A stray motorcycle slices the silence of 3 AM.
A wind picks up along the ridge, hissing like ice on a hot iron.
How to break into one's infinity with grace? How to slide down the backside of life?
The question begins to percolate behind the seething mind, once so hedonized it was lead by the bloody tracks, the ripe fruit, the swaying hips, the narcototic howl of midnight. Now, a mind beguiled by less, and tipped toward the eternal contemplates star movements, seismic shifts, the price of oil, emerging markets.
It only took a small thing: Some buried memory, some fresh wound,.... some re-positioning of the cognitive needle,....and a valley floor opens beneath one's gaze, the tracks of their life a single path blazen through its midst.
Hindsight, and trajectory. All in one fell assessment.
Age 40.
When the cryptic language and foggy memories can no longer blunder along without temples falling apart.
When perhaps the temple protects almost nothing but the last remnants of a youthful fire that never burnt fields, scorched mountains, or endured tsunamis.
When perhaps the future looms like a monolith of light and hope, beckoning that you solve future riddles with mirth and lust, like a Leprechaun, lucky with your clover fields.
When perhaps you learn from your own words to a 2 year old daughter: "Only stand on things which are stable and can hold you up without breaking."
And looking around and answering that very question, in the only silence one gets these days- at 3 AM, with a single motorcycle slicing the silence like boiling ice on a cherry iron.
I had an idea, perhaps inspired by this looming 40th year of life (41st if you count in the East Asian birth calendar, which believes that the moment of conception is the actual moment of one's life, thus adding 9 months to most Westerner's age), of a drug I named "Epiphany." Imagine being able to synthesize, or at least isolate the chemical reactions one experiences moments before they almost die. That sense of time slowing down to tiny increments, of seeing one's life fly in their mind's eye like a warp speed slide show, yet complete with the entire, complex emotional content of that memory- so a wash of experiences, sads, happies, dazed, ecstatic, that accumulate into an emotional aftertaste, a flavor one can judge.
Imagine being able to take Epiphany whenever one needed to check in with themselves, know who they are, sense their decisions, their chosen limitations, and return to the roots of their happiness. Sitting here at the precipie into the after life, (kinda joking here...), I'm betting there'd be a rush at 18, then 40, then, perhaps before it was dying time.
Imagine a world where people are capable of correcting each negative or coercive influence on their life, and stay true to their real desires.
Hard to imagine how people would be different, but I'm betting for one that people would work less, feel bad for profitting off of someone else, seek to grow rather than to be served, and hum a song that was as confident, real and resonant as anyone's.
No comments:
Post a Comment