Do my choices propel me to an inspiring future or will they keep me stuck in the past?
What a question! Behind it is the assumption that the past is to be avoided and the future full of hope. Truly, every moment of this life we stand at the cross-reads. Small decisions have an awful or awesome trajectory. Generally the things that we take for granted seem to be most pregnant with anticipation and bursting with possibilities. Part of this is the hope that I bring to the choice. I cannot forecast with precision the outcomes of my choices. I can make good choices in the moment that have horrific results. I can make poor choices in the moment that bring me to a renaissance. I do not believe that in the web of possible outcomes that we are Invictus, the masters of our ships and captains of our souls. We make choices and live with the outcomes, planned and unplanned, anticipated and unforeseen.
I suppose for me the real issue is do I choose to take from the past that which will enable me to move quickly toward a brighter future.
That is a question, indeed. I have so little recall of the past. One example: my sister tells a story about a dolly that she loved that I am said to have thrown into a tree. This was for her a defining moment. I have no memory of the incident. Something must have happened as the dolly was found in the branches of the tree several years later – when both of us were young adults and living out of our parents’ home – where my sister said it had been thrown. There was no reason for her to have falsified the incident, and the objective finding of the dolly in the tree says that there is truth. But equally, I have no memory of it. The past is a murky pool for me. I expect that this was part of my love for history, an attempt to become memory where there was no memory. For me it is a question of making peace with the void and noting the emotional dissonance when it occurs.
In some ways that is helpful: having few memories of the past is hardly tantamount to having no past, but it certainly may be as near as makes no matter.
There is white noise for me where others have memory. It is just as well, I suppose, if something in my mind short-circuited the past it was for a reason that I can only presume to be salubrious. This means that I am free and in a sense unfettered by a past to haunt or captivate the now. But there is still that sticky wicket about an inspiring future. Inspiration: to be inbreathed, full of spirit, enthusiasm. All of that has biblical imagery running deeply to its core. This hearkens back to Genesis, where YHWH is said to have inspired the dust of the ground to make it live. Thus we are enthused, from εν θέιός, to be in the divine (more on that issue on the last musing). Life is the breath of God that animates us and makes this dust live. All days are inspired as apart from this infusion we die. I am reminded of a poem by Dylan Thomas:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
How, then, to honor the spirit that courses through my very being? Is this divine breath a maelstrom or a gentle breeze that propels the ship toward its home-port? I can recognize the trajectory but cannot answer the question in any definitive way. Perhaps that is the key: that in the now, not the future or the past, I live and must decide, trusting whatever gods there are and seeking their grace...
Ah, but I am only a fool….
