Saturday, February 9, 2019

Everything Eternal





Right now I’m on the couch, listening to the wailing voice of Adam Duritz, whose songs with Counting Crows have helped me cry for 25 years.  I’m thinking about time, and love, and how little glitches in the brain keep us from living a joyous life.

Last night I sat with someone I love inside an idling car, staring at eyes, and then snow, and then eyes, and then snow.  The feeling was temporary; as temporary as the snow. It felt like eternity, but it wasn’t eternal.

I realized I don’t know how to process this life outside the lens of eternity. 

Everything used to be the long game.  The sell for the next phase of existence.  The mortal coil was the pre-game.  It made pain more bearable.  Suffering could be understood because it would end.  Eventually, all would be made right.

I still process things through the lens of eternity.  When I love, I don’t know how to view it as anything but forever.  It puts an unrealistic weight on every feeling I have.  An “I love you” is forever.  Rejection is forever.  Indifference is forever.  All things are for a single purpose, the endless melding of souls with the ultimate. 

Bazan once wrote, “the crew have killed the captain, but they still can hear his voice.” 

I no longer have a captain, or a boat, or a crew.  But the voice of eternity is still haunting my feelings every day.  I don’t know what it’s like to know someone I love is a temporary love.  That a hobby won’t last forever.  That friends will die.  None of it makes sense to me. 

I’m beginning to feel that I’ve lived too safe a life.  I think I’d like to little less safely.  Take more risks.  Enter conflict voluntarily.  Kiss someone I know I’ll never see again. 

I have to learn to live a temporary life.  The weight of eternity is souring the best things I have without my permission.  I need to hold the people I love with a weaker grip.  Learn to detach from places and people and things a little more, to give them the freedom to come and go without it meaning so much to me.  With attachment comes suffering, and I am tired of suffering. 
Following the time in the car, I returned home, picked up a guitar, and sang songs to a small group of people who had taken mushrooms, were sitting near the fire and watching the snow fall. For a moment, I knew how to live in the temporary.  Here's to more moments like that in the near future.

 

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