living – Page 20 – Picking Up Roots

Around or Through

Everyone he talked to said things would get better in time. If he just waited another day, another week, another month, maybe in a year. He held on. It was all he knew how to do.

He’d spent too much of his life dancing around his problems. Time wasn’t a renewable resource. That lesson had hit home in his 30s. He was done wasting it. Now he went through his challenges.

This was different. It wasn’t outside him. It was within. It was eating away at his insides. No one knew. He didn’t want anyone to feel bad. Pity would destroy the strength he kept calling upon.

Everyone who told him things would get better, thought he was just like them: unhappy with his work, disenchanted with the struggle to make ends meet or upset by the state of the world. He was all those things too, but what was consuming him made those problems pale in comparison.

He’d grown up in a family of hearty souls. They took what was before them, accepted it as what it was and made the best of it, carrying on.

In his 20s he’d moved away from that mindset. In truth, he’d never known he had it. Somewhere in that decade he’d thought he could avoid his problems. If he ignored them – or gave them a wide berth – he might avoid them.

One morning time slapped him in the face as he stared at the reflection in his mirror. The soft, sleep deprived face staring back at him showed patches of gray; the face of a stranger. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked closer. He didn’t recognize himself. He thought about his life. Wondered where the gray had come from, wondered if his life had had any meaning.

Over the course of the morning he looked back and saw how empty he was. How he’d thrown relationships away by running from their challenges. How little that had left him with. He felt like a shell. In that moment, he determined to change. To take life head on and do his best to live it, no matter what came his way. He’d done that. He’d changed. Life was better.

But now this.

Ever since that morning, he’d always looked for a way through; was always confident he’d get to the other side. Today, in his current state, he wasn’t so certain.

He sat upon the bridge, legs dangling into the nothing below. The river looked calm, inviting. He thought about peace.

The world was waking up. Cars rumbled by behind him. The sun was beginning to burn up the horizon. He’d need to decide soon: around or through.

Passages

I feel the yoke of time
in the new found aches -
arising from basic living -
of this body;

I see time's passage
in the flecks of gray
spotting my temples
and its fields
taking control of my beard;

I know time's wisdom
as my own has grown
through my experiences of the world
providing me
a calmer mind;

I know
I cannot outrun Time,
but I can make the most of it
by living as it passes

A Good Life

They clung to life. The only strength left in their body was channeled into the desperate grip of the fingers that held fast to this world.

Theirs was a life of the greatest opulence. They had wanted more and more, so they had taken it. It had been easy for them to look past the adage “of whom much is given, much is expected.” They’d been too busy enjoying their lavish life to think about what might be expected of them. They had never stopped to understand that no matter the great amounts of wealth and things they accumulated, they would still end up in the same place as those whose backs they broke in their efforts to accumulate more.

They had spent their money on age-defying tonics and treatments, doing everything they could to ward of the ravages of time. It came for them sooner than most.

None of the tinctures and remedies could touch their soul, and the soul is what keeps the ultimate score. As their luxurious extremes grew, their soul blackened as each day slipped away.

It began as small cracks in their façade – a hitch in their step, a cough, a moment of blurred vision – but grew with the passing of time. The cracks became deeper faults. Their hair fell out, they lost the vision in one eye, and were always ill.

It should be said, they were not bad, just oblivious to the destruction their opulence caused the world around them or within themselves. They never calculated the cost of their excesses; never understood the sum of everything always ended as nothing.

They never nurtured their soul, and it left them. Their major mistake– the one of so many – was to believe living the ‘good life’ was the same as living a good life.