A New Road

I turned 82 today and it seems a good occasion to give some thought to the future. Of course, like many of us, my thoughts and concerns often hang their hats on the future, but it is rare that my present state of being feels invited along for the visit. I’d like to share an experience from two days ago, in which the rest of me did feel invited along.

Perhaps this experience has stayed around in my mind because I was paying attention to the usual memories and associations as they passed through my mind; and this may have allowed me to notice when an imagined fantasy seemed different than the others. What felt different was that the imagined scene was neither a memory from my familiar scrapbook of memories nor a hope that some desire would be fulfilled in the future. Instead, this imagined scene–of something that will never happen in ‘real life’—felt like the unfolding of a vision with its own truth.

It was about my son, Jon, who died five plus years ago. Instead of a memory of the past, which can feel like walking across a minefield, a field that is simplest to avoid entirely by walking a different way; instead of an anticipation of some future circumstance in which he might have been present but won’t be; what came into my mind was that I had reached a point in my life (which thankfully has not arisen) when I needed help with activities of daily living and perhaps help transferring from bed to a wheelchair. In this imagined scene, Jon was the one who was there for me when I needed that kind of help.

I don’t know if it’s actually an accurate reading of his character, because toward the end his level of frustration made him retreat into an angry part of himself and so for those last months he couldn’t look after anyone else; he couldn’t even look after himself. But as a reading of his character over the previous 27 years, this imagined scene feels true. I’m tempted to say that it was truer of Jon than of most of the people I have met in this life: he liked helping people and feeling connected with them. Imagining this scene gave me a feeling of Jon being released from my frozen pictures, to live another day. Of course, the past is not absent from this scene; it is built from our lifetime together.

There was another element of this scene also built on a remembered interaction; but it continued into a realm beyond anything in my survivor’s scrapbook of memories.

Jon once said to me that he hoped I realized how much intelligence he had needed to work out an understanding of the world of human interactions so that he could live inside it. (Of course, I will forever remember that stunning assertion). In my imagined evocation of Jon being present in a fresh way, he had written something. As in a dream, there was nothing for me to actually read; but the feeling I had was that Jon had written something profoundly true. It was similar to the construct he had told me about, in his final year on Planet Earth, when he was unable to know how to live in this world without it. But rather than that simple statement, uttered from a daily life I know was often very difficult for him, I now imagined myself with a sheaf of papers in my hand. They vividly told the story of what it was like to be one of the people who had not been successfully conditioned to fit in with our society.

I then imagined myself telling Jon—in complete truthfulness—that his piece so clearly expressed what it feels like to be hovering at the edges of our world, that it would be a great comfort to others who also feel that kind of alienation. But it also expressed that isolation so clearly that people who are able to fit in–such as I am able to fit in–would be able to see a wider ocean of being lapping against the shoreline of this world; where arbitrary agreements and conditioned echoes of those agreements establish the fields of convenience, which we call world and truth.