What I feel is how hard it is to enter into the right relationship with time. If you feel too great a sense of urgency, it does not unfold. You are never emotionally present for whatever and whoever is happening. And if you have no plan and simply drift, you blink and 20 years has passed.
I feel the story of Rip van Winkle is about, in part, emotional dissociation. When you shield yourself from emotional hurt, you also isolate yourself from emotional participation in what is happening around you. Time passes, and you can’t feel it; it is like it is flowing over stainless steel, versus mud and sand. In the one case there is no texture and in the latter there is.
There are many subtle pains in this world, but all of them need to be processed to be living as a proper human being. What a confusing, strange place this world is!!!
I have certainly not been silent, and I have dedicated my days to understanding, so on an abstract level I have that, but I don’t feel that very well. I feel how distant and cold I have been, through an incapacity to be any other way.
My children are wonderful–I do have that, and I suppose in this strange world raising genuinely good children is an accomplishment–but my life is far from over. I think I am merely completing one phase, and entering another, hopefully better phase.
My father crossed a long life and seems to have learned nothing. He spent much of his last 20-30 years watching television. I think my mother will be the same.
My life is a reaction to that, but it has proven so hard to shake the protective numbness they bestowed on me by osmosis.
Even now, there are people falling all around us. There are suicides every day in most large cities. People found, perhaps after a few days, perhaps after a few weeks, and there are police who file reports, and people who gather up the bodies (I memorably shared a few drinks once with a guy who did that, and I could tell he was looking at me from the perspective of how he would move me if I was dead), and perhaps coroners who do the autopsies, and people who notify relatives, and people who have to figure out how to dispose of the bodies.
This world is magical, and it is horrible. But my curiosity and wonder never flag. I suppose I have that too.