WHAT HAPPENS IN OUR LIVES

When I was in high school, I was acquainted with many students in my high school. I had a few friends but most I just said “hello” to now and then. A good number of students had graduated with me from grade school, in fact probably most. But I had few that I was close to, much less “knew.” Part of that was because such was my nature. I could be funny and charming but I didn’t tend to “let people in,” as it were. I had little confidence in myself and conversed with a few friends but not many others. I actually preferred being along—at least up the point, maybe 16, when I was found and claimed by a beautiful girl and then fell in love, which changed everything as she became my friend, my lover, and we had our incredible adventures for the next couple of years. Prior to that, depending on the season, the boys in my neighborhood would either play baseball or football in my backyard, while I would be up in my room diligently working on my stamp collection, with them all yelling in the background. I had absolutely no inclination to join them.

          My own inclination is to “seek greater context” for my life and myself. This has been my lifelong quest. I was presented with Catholicism as that context and I did learn many important lessons, such as the importance and reality of “mystery,” of “not knowing,” but I ultimately “threw the baby out with the bathwater” and went on my own personal “search for understanding” rather than accepting what I had been trained to accept. I am philosophical by nature and also seek peace and solitude actively every day. I look at what happens in life and do what I can to incorporate it into my own reality which I have created from whatever I have learned of life and my own experience of learning it. “It” is always a work in process. I don’t claim it to be necessarily “right” but it is what I have to work with; I am what I have to work with. I have no choice but to be with myself even as I am. So the “philosophizing” part is much like perpetually adding pieces to the unending jigsaw puzzle that I am and that will never be finished, not even after I die.

          But there is another part: the memories of my life, the stories of my life. Sometimes these take great precedence over the philosophizing, over the putting it all together so that it might make some kind of sense. The memories, the stories have their place. They appear to be the life and color and sound and feeling in each of the myriad pieces of the endless jigsaw puzzle that comprises me and my life. And they often rise to the surface of my consciousness, probably embellished into much more than they actually were, but in retrospect, in memory, we add to the story for effect and for meaning, for our lives must have meaning to us. We are always to be forgiven for such expansion of soul and spirit and heart. And we can no longer tell the difference anyway between “the fact” in itself and how the event impacted us and registered itself in our consciousness. In terms of our memories, are there really even any “facts,” clean cut and certain? We remember what we saw, what we heard, what we felt emotionally or physically, what we thought? All of it was fed to us through our own senses, our own experience. No body cams then or there. Perhaps reports and point of view from others, but probably not. We have no choice but to have faith in our memories, even as we have no choice but to have faith in ourselves, flawed as we may be. No one else is going to tell our stories to ourselves. We must be able to do that for ourselves. We know ourselves best, which is to also say that some of us don’t know ourselves at all. To know yourself is the primary goal of being human if you subscribe to the classic humanism of Socrates or even if you are unaware of that. To me, that equates with “loving God.”

          To return to all these fellow students at my high school and before that, they are now a part of my being, my life, my story, myself. I never anticipated at the time that they would be so stored within my mind and available for instant recall—but they are. I can even hear their adolescent voices in my memory. Last night I dreamed that I was talking to some of the girls with whom I was only slightly acquainted. We are still physically of the time but are now speaking with a wisdom of age, and are thus able to convey a warmth and a touch that would have probably not been possible during our youth. People do not lose their beauty. It may seem to retreat or be covered over but it can rise to the surface to meet itself in others. We do carry each other within ourselves, almost as though they were ourselves. When they die, they do not leave us, but even become more a part of ourselves, perhaps since they can no longer carry themselves as they did. But it never a burden to us to contain others in this way, for they somehow enhance our being with themselves. Of course, the sweet ones are easier to include and the sour ones a bit difficult perhaps, but they all bring something to us that is needed in some way. Perhaps this is the all-encompassing circle and experience of love, or simply of being. Perhaps there is no difference between the two.