WAYLAID

………………………………………………………

Jane Kenyon said: “Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Disconnect.”

………………………………………………………

WAYLAID

As I climb my personal Himalaya of every day, it’s amazing to experience the variations of terrain. Some days the climb goes very smoothly, calmly, pleasurably. Other days the climb is rough. The psyche is the real climber. Some days everybody looks and is wonderful, friendly, open. On those other jagged days people might look and act strange, distorted. The halt and lame might be struggling on the path in front of me, as they were today in Walmart, the general store we’re more or less obliged to patronize in the locality. Then either I identify with them and feel generalized empathy towards humankind or I turn my face away and I don’t want to be confronted with aberration.

The shelves in Walmart, I noticed today, have an undertone of scantiness. Didn’t we always experience unlimited abundance in the superstores to which we’ve become acclimated? It seems to me that we’ve been led down the garden path of materialism by the gods of commerce and shipping containers, but several decades back John Irving in THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP identified The Undertoad, and it feels as though The Undertoad has grown huge of late. We’re realizing that previous abundance isn’t unlimited. That the layers upon layers of all the systems of civilization have gotten beyond all of us; the quantifying of EVERYTHING is overwhelming the qualifying of everything. Password life has to justify the cleverness of all the kids thronging through the doors into what they think is the future. And while they are and we are at it, the globe is telling us that we’ve been too clever by half, and now look what we’ve done.

Even worse, our fates are now being decided by The Grossly Incompetent. Say What?

I‘m sort of throwing up my hands. I’m not done. But the goalposts have been moved. Language changes and now too much is getting lost. What is supposed to be music gets louder, louder, louder, and dumber, dumber, dumber. The communal nature of gathering for the purposes of experiencing theatre is retreating to the cold and separating hearth of the 65” flatscreen. It seems we have allowed Athens to retreat until Sparta now is dominant. We value sport, not art. I worry that the center cannot hold.

This then, is an old woman’s perspective, who remembers simpler times, as all old people have done since time immemorial. The Five Remembrances remind us of our mortality, so we can make room for what’s coming up as we’re going down.

But there is a place in all of us way deep inside, a rare place of sacredness and wisdom if we are lucky enough to take and make the inner journey. There, the awfulness of corruption and bowdlerization and degradation has the possibility of being laid to the side.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

Hard copies of DIARY OF OLDING, Vol. 3 are now available: all the SubStack postings from 2025. Volumes 1 & 2 are sold out. You can order direct: jma@thetrak.com $25 postage paid

……………………………………………………………………………………..