I did a watercolor of a wave for a friend before leaving for the beach two weeks ago. Can it have been two weeks? I painted it before leaving for the beach. While at the beach I did no watercolors. I was too busy looking at the waves, studying the waves, how they broke and foamed around my ankles; how they swelled and lifted me, carrying me away; how they broke near the horizon and reformed behind me; how the water piled up higher and higher, then tumbled down, as if downhill toward the shore.
How long has this been going on? The waves lap a billion years around the dinosaurs over the mountains and under them, roiling into the fissures left by the continental plates. The waves keep time, ticking against the sand.
As I bounced around on the swells off the shore one afternoon, amazed by how gentle the ocean was that day, I pondered my own ephemerality and the emphemerality of human civilization. We've barely made a scratch; even should global warming or holocaust doom the planet for habitation - the planet will go on. Our blip: one minute killing a mastadon with a stick, the next second programming a computer chip: vanished without a trace. What an odd event we are in the universe. What an odd event I am in the the universe: I or anyone of us: that that in a billion years of existence, across vast reaches of space, in all probability we're a conscious blip - our secrets, our antipathies and sympathies, our struggles with change and emotional maturity- occur in too brief an allotment.
I was bobbing out there, watching the waves pile up and a shrimp boat maneuver, and I considered how short a time I have: that 48 years have already passed through my hands and, for all my grasping, I'm holding only the present.
If I live as old as uncle Frank, 99, in a nursing home but with his mind entire, that is only 51 years more. It seems like a long time but my experience is that it is not enough - or maybe just enough.
I paint and create with more intensity now a days. I see a therapist so that I don't waste time in emotional cul de sacs and build my cognitive and emotional skills so that I'm not waylaid by unproductive mental obstacles. I try to eat better and get more exercise. I love Jami with all my heart has. I think of how I can be the best friend to my friends.
The curious thing to me is time. I used to think that everything I'd ever experienced was stored perfectly in my head, like my brain was a high performance video recorder. Now I realize that I've forgotten many things, misinterpreted a host of things, and concluded that my mind more likely functions as a compost pile. A dusty attic that an unknown person cleans out from time to time. What is left behind resembles a Kurt Schwitters collage: a bit of fabric, a photo, a stub. Perhaps that's why I like artists who deal is fragments: Joseph Cornell, Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Salle. My mind takes a dadist approach to the past.
To the question: What happened back there? Whether "back there" was 14th century bce Crete, 6th century bce Jerusalem, or 2nd century ce Rome - or even 1900 Butts County Georgia; can be added the question: What's happening right now? What is this? What is important right now and how do I discern where to go. As to questions about the future - they are not helpful: What will I do? How will this turn out? It's impossible to know, and these questions get in the way of understanding and living in the present.
Living in the present is pretty much the content of Israel's wisdom literature. When the writer of the pastoral epistles admonishes contentment as great gain, (s)he's echoing that literature as well as Stoic thought: that we should be content with what we need and what we have - not in what we don't need or don't have. That the measure of Godliness in us, is that rest in what God has provided. Goodbye consumerism. Don't keep us with the Joneses, instead say goodbye to them and wish them luck. Focus on where you are and what matters.
Genealogy is a distraction too. I've bent over the microfilm reader, scanning newspapers and census rolls, burning out my eyes, trying to make sense out of my family in the 19th century and early 20th. Mostly I've come away surprised at how lynching is treated as a spectacle, attended with picnics and civic pride - and the belief that at least one of my ancestors emerged out of think air. I know that if I went back in time, I would not be at home there. Life is not back there. It is important to understand the past, but with this: that we hold it up to interpretation; we cannot see them as they saw themselves and we cannot read our desires and beliefs back into their lives.
As I paddled out among the swells, always making sure my feet could touch the bottom, I was content.
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