Once we are over the hill (when life's demands seems greater
than our
resourcefulness) life can seem to be a matter of letting
it demolish the
marvellously elaborate and beautifully
obscure stories we once generated
for ourselves (or picked up and ran with, embellishing them
as we went?).
This collapse of everything we held sacred can seem horrendous;
yet we
can bite the bullet whilst we cut our losses or see our investments,
what
we fought and struggled for and won at great cost, simply
turn to dust.
(Would that we could see such disintegration as evidence that
we had
experiencing qualified satisfaction
of our fundamental needs; otherwise
those relationships would have developed rather than fallen
to bits.)
And the nostalgia, the dreams and hopes and the compulsions
of what
we had to do, what we had to have, where we had to go all
pass before
our eyes. Yet like refugees driven from their war torn homes
we move
on with nomadic and migratory energy to do what needs to be
done.
It is almost impossible to voluntarily change the attitudes
and habits of a
lifetime; yet as reality breaks into the nightmare it helps
if we can stop
digging; but with little practice of such a volte face it
seems natural to
snatch at anything which seems to offer a way back to how
things were.
Yet free from the dead weight of what ought to have been we
can come to
terms with life as it is; weaned from a dependency on what
seems certain
we enjoy a migratory and nomadic energy to realise the potential
of our
fundamental needs and find a new resourcefulness.
But no more swashbuckling heroics nor rushing in where angels
fear to
tread nor throwing pearls before swine nor biting off more
than we can
chew; we must keep dry what bit of powder we still have.
Nor regrets nor blaming oneself at what might have been, or
got away;
we did as we did, had we known better we would have acted
differently.
We move into a low key mode of creating an environment within
which
we can realise the potential of our
fundamental needs doing what needs
to be done; this is to move from theologic
into a biologic mode.
With new friends we don't snatch at love but find we are affectionate;
we
don't scream for more knowledge but understand our own feelings
and
know our own mind; with a dry bed and dinner each day we are
economic
people and lose our fearful insatiable appetites for more.
And what we bring to life is good; our friends do too. In that
intimacy we
speak straight to friend and enemy; we take each other seriously
and new
worlds we never imagined are open to us. We need new friends
when we,
like Lot's wife, tend to look back and regret and even berate
ourselves.
Maybe one day our children, and their children, will forgive
us that when
they were small and asked only our timing feeling and understanding
that
we, knowing no better, were seduced by ikons of marvellously
elaborate
and beautifully obscure ideas of what it meant to be someone;
alas we
wasted ourselves imitating the great and the good.
The sting of all this is in the tail; if we refuse to come
to terms with life
we can find ourselves in a desperate race against time trying
to beat the
system by all manner of cosmetic tricks - before it's too
late! |