Quiet Rivers

The merest thought of death and dying depresses me. I wrote Requiem a while back and I’ve been despondent for weeks. I’m not just hearing my bones creak, I can palpably feel my soul gnashing its figurative teeth on the awareness of how the more I strive at honest writing, the more affected I am by the reflections that glitter truth back at me from the mere passage of words.

It is hard to keep yourself impersonally apart from things that affect you; things that you have struggled for, or against — enough to write about them with appropriate sanity. If there is something in my writing that scares me, other than fabrication, then it is that those thoughts that I have…somehow put off at an earlier time…or a continuity of them, would be instrumental in taking all the basic beliefs I’ve built up for myself down, so much like a house of playing cards.

Finity scares me. But then, it scares most of us. Deep down in all of us, even to the cellular level, the need to survive, the drive to propagate life, can take the most awful forms, can impel us to our most destructive. Both ignorance and knowledge can take us to the deepest levels of the unknown, in the same way that it can elevate us. It only takes enough scared people to start a war. It only takes enough enlightened people to fan an ember of intent into a bonfire that might change a way of life. Consider your own basic drives, your own deepest needs. Consider the myriad avenues that can be opened, merely from the contemplation of our most basic impulses. What drives us?

Most of us blithely go through our days with our hearts leading the way in the guise of empty cups begging to be filled, always waiting for someone to affirm our personal existence — to love us. Who hasn’t cried, “Will someone ever cherish me for what I am?” Who hasn’t ever silently screamed, “Here I am, someone, please, love me?” For every voice screaming that fulfillment only comes with affirmation from someone with worth, there’s a thousand other songs which counsel that there can never be any love unless you learn to give it away. Depending on our individual coherency, we either sing it better or cry it in the worst possible way. If we are lucky enough to scream that particular anguish on top of a deserted mountaintop, then we can save ourselves the agony of possible impositions from even more vulnerable needing souls whose penchant for destruction might be even more determined than our own. Those of us who dive headlong into life unprepared tend to experience the worst from the grimmest demons, from self and from others.

Each moment we have lived, or will ever live, is permanent, and thus everyone who has ever been a part of those moments with us are irrevocably attached to us. The natural law of cause and effect is too well evident in this. We are all changed, we can all be moved — just as the weakest of breezes can nudge one leaf off its intended path to the ground, just as the most fastidious of us can come out of the bathroom and find a ball of lint peeking out of his belly-button — simply by sharing space, sharing experience.

We never know how we face life in a given instance until the moment comes with its specific need, its singular impetus, its particular demand. One day we can give such kindness to beggar a saint, another day we can be so needfully thirsty we would dry up the deepest well if we had mouth enough to swallow all the water, the next day we learn so much of the value of humility, the day after that we can start a war to turn this planet into cinder. And all because we hate. All because we love. All because we believe.

Emotional sufficiency, among other things, is the ability, the capacity, to treat memories as they rightfully deserve — with sufficient intent to go on beyond them; to reduce that which ever seeks to hold us back, by holding their shadows against the light of a greater perspective, so that they will hold us back no longer than the time we can weigh the inherent uselessness of reliving them again — and this as mere bumps in the landscape through which we must make our way upwards, ever onwards. One might question “how many wrongs does it take to make a right?”. One would be wrong, thus, to spend too much time going around that particular bush. It is wrong to put one’s life on the shelf, merely because someone else mistook and treated it as a dismissible pimple in the ruins of his own life. We only have the grace of the individual lifetime, but a veritable parade of sunsets and sunrises. To meet one sunset, even with the most abysmal pain, should also involve complete awareness of the inevitability of a new day, with all its attendant possibilities. This does not even involve the most complex of emotional contortions — it merely implies unswerving commitment to self, and its intended purpose. That purpose is to realize one’s greatest potential, emotional and otherwise.

I can think and rethink the aspects of my own avuncular experiences; employ a whole host of words, screen them through a veritable melange of moods, to categorize them according to what degree of insult each one has somehow skewered my ideals into, somehow transmuting my most basic beliefs into unrecognizable chunks of hates and pains, each one lost to the other’s separate misery, until I reach an equally inevitable ocean of abstraction. I can envison how many more share the same dilemnas, wrestle with similar demons I could do that, yes, until I can approximate limbo itself. We could all do that until we can know chaos more than chaos knows itself. Even silence is a choice. Going around the world selling trinkets for the Rev. Moon is a choice. Slugging it out in the trenches along with a mindless host is a choice.

In fact, there is no other choice that can lead to something other than ultimate cessation of individual life or racial sentience. There is nothing that is certain; except change, except death. But because we are what we are, we can choose the manner of our leavetakings. If redemption must exist, then it would lie in that choosing.

Having, thus, established how moot we are to the ultimate purpose of our universe, then we can go back to asking ourselves how we can choose how our lifetimes must be accordingly spent. We can choose to travel life as mendicants, holding our hearts out as begging bowls for others to put love or misery there, as they please. We can destroy each other, and ourselves. We can choose to be bystanders and watch others expend their souls and lives to useless expediences. We can blow ourselves up, and others. Or we can hold our lives, and their fleetingness, as lamps along the darkest corners of our world, with the sole intent of lighting — not merely our own flagging spirits — but those of others who are bound to groping through their own darknesses with the same querulous questions of meaning.

I propose that questions of love and questions of identity are so intertwined that they must be the same, individually and collectively. If there are ultimate, completely human answers, then they lie in accepting that there might be no answers at all, and that the best ways to being loved, and finding peace, might be through being able to accept — to love, to forgive, to forget — one’s self first, and then to embrace the world in the most basic of ways, the most honest of manners.

Let us go through life with our hearts open; not as begging cups or battering rams, but as sparkling fountains. Let us go through life, not glorifying the drudgery of having the occasional day to ourselves, perhaps sprawled in bed watching TV, living life second-hand, and eating popcorn, away from the general stuffiness of work-mates and friends, separate from the awful dreariness of war, but instead, by meeting insult with understanding, by diverting slight with insight, by seeing through other people’s rough edges to the bright diamonds within, and by finding the kindest ways to exist together. Let us live our spans, be they book-ended by a caterpillar’s crawl towards its wings and a moth’s final plummet to searing flame or by the death of an old pain and the birth of a new one, by cherishing the world with such questions as “what stranger’s life might I brighten up with a giving smile?”, “what child might I point towards a life of kindness with a gentle example of tactfulness?”, “who might I love better with the simplest touch, the softest kiss?”, “in what corner of a foggy world might I light up by a life of joy and service?”

Only one life to live. It scares me to contemplate it. So many lives caught in darkness. That scares me even more.

Oh Lord, let us find meaning in it. Let us choose to live!

For every hundred voices screaming spite, let one voice — yours — sing free about the love you can hold for two, for three, even for an uncaring world that can swallow your life in a wink. For every thousand jackals braying war and chaos, let one hummingbird’s wings — yours — fan peace into a universe locked in discord. For every million lives suffering inarticulation silently, let one life — yours — raise itself into a simple word of joyous acceptance for the foibles of the human race.