They Still Blame the Sea
This is the inevitable New Year's post. I tried to avoid it. But I keep feeling it tugging so why fight it. Last night someone in the small cluster of relatives I was spending the eve with asked, basically, what do we expect of the year 2006? After we all half-heartedly made a few attempts at mustering up something positive out of that old repetition of adding 1 to our previous year's date, someone said to me, "Hey, you'll be 35 this year, that's only 15 years away from 50!" I'd always felt myself prepared against and somewhat immune, in a very dishonest way I now see, to the impending crisis of middle age (and to be even less delusional, middle age is a tad closer than 15 years away), but with those simple words I found myself suddenly at the event horizon of the black hole of regret, sinking, quickly and well in advance, into a veritable panic striken morass of self-doubt and disappointment that instantly overrode anything positive and worthy of appreciation that my life had forged thus far.
But this was good.
(Though it didn't need to be New Year's that brought it on. It's ridiculous to think we need such flaccid events as this to make us question the meaning of our lives. It just so happens that because of the mystique of January 1st, the question came up from the aforementioned train of thought.)
And while at the time it didn't feel all that good, I knew something good could come of this darkness if I critiqued my own reaction to these words about my inevitable approach to the half century mark. Why did it fill me with terror to realise I was aging and that time was passing more quickly each day? What was it about my life or life in our culture in general that seemed to have tricked me into a complacency and laziness that was suddenly slashed and torn open, bleeding like a wound?
What in my life should I have done differently?
What could I change now so that from here on in I do things right?
What projects had a I put off long enough?
What good things could I try to nuture and make even more fruitful?
Was there really any hope of staving off crushing regret or was it already too late?
Maybe I should just give up, lay down and die a slow, hopefully forty-years-away-minimum, death and try to wear a smile so as not to disturb the others around me who might still have a chance of making it work for them even under the spell of their own personal delusions.
Of course, this fundamental questioning of life direction wasn't new to me at all. I'd thought about it before, discussed it with a handful of friends, you know, the idea that our own life and the way we see it, not to mention the way we see the world and understand our place in it, is at the mercy of perception and socio-cultural discourse and paradigms. But what is the best way to perceive it? That is the real question. Which way of seeing one's life would not be a convenient slight of hand trick just to make things easier? Which way would not simply allow us to avoid the pain and difficulty of a more truthful way of seeing it? And which way, though it may seem to offer us that tough-love with its screams of "You've failed! You're a big nothing nobody!" is equally dangerous for it's insistence on a rare or impossible to achieve state of success and happiness? Basically, what I think it comes down to, is how to determine the right way of seeing one's life so that it is neither too "I'm okay, you're okay, let's all go for ice cream" nor making such demands that will paralyze one from doing anything productive or worthwhile at all for being so massively difficult to achieve and visualize from the outset.
Oh but these are cliched, yet fundamental problems for any semi-conscious human being!
And just previous to the mention that in a relatively short period of time I'd hit the big 5-0, we'd all been watching a documentary in which the testimony of several survivors of last year's tsunami framed images of destruction and chaos. And though it may seem clear (and maybe I'm being generous here) that it was not an act of god meant to strike down sinners, and was, rather, a natural disaster that was made worse by a lack of infrastructure to warn inhabitants and tourists of such a freak event, almost everyone in the documentary seemed to blame the sea for "the death it had wrought". Some said it was a friend before and an enemy now, projecting the failure of government to create safety mechanisms onto a body of water that cannot care whether or not we see it as friend or foe. Others stated that we must have somehow deserved it, brought it on ourselves (true, but not because of a sin that offended god but, again, only because we weren't smart enough to put in the failsafes that were necessary and do exist in other parts of the world). The handful of Westerners who were interviewed were a bit more mute on the subject. Most focused solely on their personal experience of it and in the end acted more as camera or storyteller rather than as way of coming to an understanding about the event itself. The most surprisingly clear statement came from the natives of the Nicobar islands on which every member of their communities had survived. And though they too had a culturally-based, even religious explanation as to why it had happenend (the Sea and the Land are in constant battle over boundaries and thus everything is subject to change, and something too about the world being situated at the top of a tall tree that the gods shake every now and again to test us), they were able, because they knew their world and their place in it, to see the signs that something was coming and they needed to act in a very specific way to survive it. They saw, just as the home video taken by tourists shows, that something unusual was unfolding, the sea receded suddenly and then a giant wave built up on the horizon and came in to shore rapidly. But whereas the tourists and even some local villagers waited until it was all but too late (one person caught on video even stood stock still and faced it in his speedo never flinching even as the wave overtook him and he disappeared), these long-time inhabitants of the islands of Nicobar simply understood, based on traditional teachings, ancestral knowledge and a firm sense of their place in the world, an identity. They knew what to do. They needed to find shelter and fast and that all would be good and continue on after if they did so. They had the confidence of their perception of the world that allowed them to continue to live another day. There was no way they were caught standing staring into the face of death and wishing they had a camera.
The man who told this story walked along the shore with his 3 children and an ethnologist. He carried one child on his back supported by a strap around his own forehead. As the interview ended he walked off down the shore. He had no questions to ask of the ethnologist. He went on his way and left us behind, staring.
But this was good.
(Though it didn't need to be New Year's that brought it on. It's ridiculous to think we need such flaccid events as this to make us question the meaning of our lives. It just so happens that because of the mystique of January 1st, the question came up from the aforementioned train of thought.)
And while at the time it didn't feel all that good, I knew something good could come of this darkness if I critiqued my own reaction to these words about my inevitable approach to the half century mark. Why did it fill me with terror to realise I was aging and that time was passing more quickly each day? What was it about my life or life in our culture in general that seemed to have tricked me into a complacency and laziness that was suddenly slashed and torn open, bleeding like a wound?
What in my life should I have done differently?
What could I change now so that from here on in I do things right?
What projects had a I put off long enough?
What good things could I try to nuture and make even more fruitful?
Was there really any hope of staving off crushing regret or was it already too late?
Maybe I should just give up, lay down and die a slow, hopefully forty-years-away-minimum, death and try to wear a smile so as not to disturb the others around me who might still have a chance of making it work for them even under the spell of their own personal delusions.
Of course, this fundamental questioning of life direction wasn't new to me at all. I'd thought about it before, discussed it with a handful of friends, you know, the idea that our own life and the way we see it, not to mention the way we see the world and understand our place in it, is at the mercy of perception and socio-cultural discourse and paradigms. But what is the best way to perceive it? That is the real question. Which way of seeing one's life would not be a convenient slight of hand trick just to make things easier? Which way would not simply allow us to avoid the pain and difficulty of a more truthful way of seeing it? And which way, though it may seem to offer us that tough-love with its screams of "You've failed! You're a big nothing nobody!" is equally dangerous for it's insistence on a rare or impossible to achieve state of success and happiness? Basically, what I think it comes down to, is how to determine the right way of seeing one's life so that it is neither too "I'm okay, you're okay, let's all go for ice cream" nor making such demands that will paralyze one from doing anything productive or worthwhile at all for being so massively difficult to achieve and visualize from the outset.
Oh but these are cliched, yet fundamental problems for any semi-conscious human being!
And just previous to the mention that in a relatively short period of time I'd hit the big 5-0, we'd all been watching a documentary in which the testimony of several survivors of last year's tsunami framed images of destruction and chaos. And though it may seem clear (and maybe I'm being generous here) that it was not an act of god meant to strike down sinners, and was, rather, a natural disaster that was made worse by a lack of infrastructure to warn inhabitants and tourists of such a freak event, almost everyone in the documentary seemed to blame the sea for "the death it had wrought". Some said it was a friend before and an enemy now, projecting the failure of government to create safety mechanisms onto a body of water that cannot care whether or not we see it as friend or foe. Others stated that we must have somehow deserved it, brought it on ourselves (true, but not because of a sin that offended god but, again, only because we weren't smart enough to put in the failsafes that were necessary and do exist in other parts of the world). The handful of Westerners who were interviewed were a bit more mute on the subject. Most focused solely on their personal experience of it and in the end acted more as camera or storyteller rather than as way of coming to an understanding about the event itself. The most surprisingly clear statement came from the natives of the Nicobar islands on which every member of their communities had survived. And though they too had a culturally-based, even religious explanation as to why it had happenend (the Sea and the Land are in constant battle over boundaries and thus everything is subject to change, and something too about the world being situated at the top of a tall tree that the gods shake every now and again to test us), they were able, because they knew their world and their place in it, to see the signs that something was coming and they needed to act in a very specific way to survive it. They saw, just as the home video taken by tourists shows, that something unusual was unfolding, the sea receded suddenly and then a giant wave built up on the horizon and came in to shore rapidly. But whereas the tourists and even some local villagers waited until it was all but too late (one person caught on video even stood stock still and faced it in his speedo never flinching even as the wave overtook him and he disappeared), these long-time inhabitants of the islands of Nicobar simply understood, based on traditional teachings, ancestral knowledge and a firm sense of their place in the world, an identity. They knew what to do. They needed to find shelter and fast and that all would be good and continue on after if they did so. They had the confidence of their perception of the world that allowed them to continue to live another day. There was no way they were caught standing staring into the face of death and wishing they had a camera.
The man who told this story walked along the shore with his 3 children and an ethnologist. He carried one child on his back supported by a strap around his own forehead. As the interview ended he walked off down the shore. He had no questions to ask of the ethnologist. He went on his way and left us behind, staring.
posted by Sinkchicken at 10:05 a.m.
2 Comments:
great to see you haven't hit the wall yet, with no positives to be taken from the realization of wasted time.
this is the year to finally make change, or accept defeat, with little in betweens.
yes the tsunami of time passing also hit me recently like a brick wall... or did i hit it?
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