Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew…, Five hundred years ago, everybody knew…, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew…, imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.
~ Kay; MIB 1997
Looking past your past
There are somethings that we experience that we should have the right to forget. Not everything, not the important stuff like Ivy’s Gotcha Day, the day we pulled my soon-to-be-faithful sidekick away from her mother and family and included her in ours.
Maybe it was something we said or did that had ramifications that we were too obtuse to comprehend; harsh words exchanged with someone we love were anything but loving, exposing our true colors. Maybe, it was more permanent, such as a diagnosis, or the unexpected passing of someone close. It may even be a personal or professional failure that resurfaces at the most inopportune times.
My birthday is one day that I now would prefer to forget. It serves as a marker of sorts. It was at my 50th birthday party, a gift from my lovely wife, where it became evident to others, then to her and finally to me, that something was wrong. Doctor’s appointments would soon follow, culminating into a life-changing declaration delivered by a man in a white coat with letters behind his name, “You have Parkinson’s.” It would be a few years of tears and bitterness, anger and heartbreak before we could see how anything good could come from it.
Bueller, Bueller…
Life does move pretty fast. It shouldn’t take a righteous dude crooning atop a float in a St. Patricks Day Parade to show us that something good can and does happen almost every day. If we can’t see it, something is amiss. What, then, is holding our attention, the pressure to do more? It is a dichotomy. By design, we are created to engage the world around us but we are conditioned to believe that we must live to the edge of the page, leaving no white space on our calendars to engage those who pass through our orbit.
Kay meet Jay
Our future longs to escape the shadows of our past, a past that is not easily shaken. It’s our past, including our miss-steps, and our impediments— physical, mental, spacial, chemical or otherwise — that desires to shape our future. It will, but only if we let it. Hidden in our backyards, behind the fences we erect, are remnants, once treasured artifacts and relics of what could have been, that are now reduced to litter. Try as we might to alter our past, we mothball the versions that we think will serve us, shipping them off to the emotional equivalent to Area 51.
Our past doesn’t want to stay in the shadows; it demands credence while we would prefer to see some parts erased. Until a flashy do-hickey that erases memories comes to market, like the one held tightly by Tommy Lee Jones, a.k.a., Kay, we won’t have the luxury of having one in our toolbox. It sure would come in handy if we forget some of our memories, even if it’s just for a short while. Just imagining the possibilities is enough to get a tingle running up my pant leg.
Its all Greek
That leaves me with this question. How do you think about and measure your allotment of time? Is it all quantitative; numbers and factoids. Do you think of it in terms of “Kronos” as a chronological series of events that, when rewound, reads like an actuary’s diary?
Maybe there is another option. Maybe we need to think of the time we are allotted, not as linear but as circular, a plethora of interconnected events and people, as “kairos”. Would it change what rocks we carry in our buckets if you knew with whom we will cross paths and in what way we can engage them in a life-changing, if not a supernatural, way?
Its Your Story
Do you want your story sanitized; reading in such a way that it will make Jack Web envious, chronicling just the facts? If that’s not your style, maybe your story is better suited for a master story-teller such as Bono or Branson, Springsteen or Spielberg.
If you can’t get any of their agents to return your call, I hear there is a guy in Michigan who is pretty good; you just have to get past his dog.
Thanks for reading, liking and sharing,
You will have to forgive Ivy. We lost her for a while after a run-in with a flashy memory-erasing do-hickey thing. She now thinks that she is an influencer.
Al and his faithful, but unpersuasive sidekick, Ivy the Wonder Pup.
It’s just an expression Ivy, pigs don’t fly. Even with your silver tongue, trying to convince the guys at Area 51 that the Wolverines should be ranked in the top 20 is a stretch. They live in the real world.