Thursday, August 28, 2014

Unprepared

“This is a test, this is just a test…of your emergency broadcasting system”…I had that warning pop into my head as I resisted returning to my fully conscious mind in bed this morning.

Lately my carefully planned life, with all the promises dreamt as a newlywed, has gone awry. I’m not who I planned on becoming and neither are the people most immediately entangled along-side. The web remains unchanged regardless of the change in weather.  It doesn’t diminish, it doesn’t expand.  I crawl from one corner to another to inspect for damages and finding none, continue to the succeeding corner and so on.  Doomed to repeat…wishing I had wings instead of a spinner.

This not being a possibility, my present self is predominately living inside my mind rather than flourishing in the spaces about me.  Must change. Must progress… for the opposite (regress) is a guarantee of failure.

In that I must progress, the exams which follow the lessons in life, must also progress.  I hate that.

Presently the lesson on the chalkboard of my life is that old is approaching.  Middle age was hard enough, I can’t imagine the coursework looming ahead. Who will teach the lessons?  Is summer school available for remediation if the core lessons are too advanced?

How does one born into the generation of “what’s your sign, baby” continue the irresistible path of pseudo-Zen mindset when the psychedelic  road to nirvana has morphed into cookie cutter houses on the straight and narrow yellow brick road?  My Land of Oz is yet over another hill and Toto has met his destiny in the never-ending poppy fields.

Again, I’m in the wrong place at the right time.  I have to fix that.  First I have to determine if I speak figuratively or not.  The former would be an easy change.  The other option would be an endeavor to be attempted by a younger me…I think.  I don’t think the middle age me is equipped for a “leap of faith”.  And please don’t take that phrase literally.

I feel like I am a character in a Dr. Seuss story.  Maybe the one with “Green Eggs and Ham” for I know what I do not like, but can’t figure out what I do.

Here’s the shortlist:  I don’t like:
·        The inevitability that my rut will define me
·        The eventuality that options for enlightenment will diminish
·        The complacency which rules today may become my reality

Ooh, that’s TRULY scary.

I started to break out and snap out of it recently.  Took a class for seniors; liked it, aced it and were it not for a personality challenge with the current professor would have stayed with it. 

Trying to reenter the "have a job and get paid for it" group, but my sixty years skill set is out of date.  Forget the draw of age-appropriate social circles…just confirmation of my eventual demise.

Yes, it’s time for a change and more schooling and more tests. More studies and thankfully I have the time for unending all-nighters.

I am totally unprepared, not the stomach ulcer, nail biting days of my youth but unprepared just the same.

So go ahead and delegate the next sequence of exams; make sure they include an essay and short answer section.  Don’t grade on a curve and no do-overs.

I am becoming who I am; fate has intervened….and if it weren’t for extra credit (of which I have gleaned an extraordinary amount), I’d be nervous.






My Time to Bloom



Today, is the first day in August, in the fifty-something year of my life, and I am admiring the few remaining perennials in my front yard. I am amazed at this seeming simple display and readily admit that I admire Mother Nature’s evolutionary processes.

For some returning blooms, the flower heads must lay fallow in the surrounding soil and the resulting seeds will be absorbed as the soil moistens…or the seed may end up a quick snack for a vigilant feathered friend. So, what determines the outcome?  Chance?  Fate?

It is reassuring to me that my lack of horticultural endeavors is rewarded each year…the seasonal colors which dot my garden, change and I let them.
Why interfere?  Nature is not symmetrical.  Just give a close look in your own reflecting glass.

Kinda wonder, though, which variety in nature’s garden shall I be?  Annual or perennial?  Maybe, neither…maybe my cultivation requires crop rotation; where the soils must lay fallow so as to not limit my full potential.

Interesting comparison; let’s explore further.

Existentialism was a topic introduced by my learned father somewhere in my tender, inquisitive, rebellious teenage years.  I guess it might have been even earlier at a time when church confirmation was on the mind of my mother; perhaps last year elementary school, which would have been my 6th grade. 

I barely recall the details of the classroom aspect of that life-altering period of six weeks probably because I had a crush on the associate minister and I spent most of the lecture time improving the handwriting of the pages of notes I had taken the week before.  As a result or in spite of my regular attendance, theology was thrust upon me. 

That direct insult to my perception of the universe left me thirsting for other possibilities.  Didn’t necessarily believe the good book.  How could I, there was no one living with any tangible evidence and the physical remains of those depicted in such riveting detail upon the pages could not be unearthed.

In my present day, I read of creatures being discovered beneath extreme depths of ice and scads of previously unidentified sea creatures are being studied by those curious minds who must share their existence to study them. These discoveries excite me. My senses are alive with wonder and appreciation.

I am still waiting for religion to catch up with science. I am satisfied that it never will.

So, call me skeptical.  The brilliant man who was my father connected with the universe and became part of something much larger leaving the learned scholars and writers of stories to duke it out.  He believed in just being. His ideology was simple and just: Man was equal to every other living body, whether gifted of breath or dust particle.

Existentialism, a relatively new addition to the English language is defined as:
:  a chiefly 20th-century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad

And…that’s the way my father would have explained it more or less.  Man (woman) must assume, must control and must weigh the pros and cons for every decision. That both increases and limits the burdens which remain self- imposed.

So, now in the garden of life where I am in bloom, is my existence tantamount upon learned survival on an evolutionary scale?  Have those who bloomed and germinated seeds planned on my participation?  And why am I still to discover
how rooted I am to the continuum of life?

As the petals begin to fade in the graying of hair and lessening of vitality, I am all a wonder about possibilities.  Probabilities notwithstanding that I will be unrecognizable and become part of the greatness still to be defined.

I began this entry of my journal the 1st day of August and it’s now almost Labor Day.  I’ve had time to reflect.  In that same garden which I view from my private studio, the very last of the blooms struggle to kiss the dusk and I’m not sure I’ll see the few remaining in tomorrow’s soft pink dawn.  I’ll just exist and learn my purpose for tomorrow, tomorrow.