The Years
So, my friend Mark says something about covering 30 years of life in three blog entries of a few paragraphs each. We can all do this when we're just giving the highlights. Even our most mundane moments and most uneventful stretches of life are far too rich with experience to be recorded exactly. And so we summarize.
We summarize the circumstances and movements that make up the life we recognize as ours during any given period. Mark lived in Korea. I lived in Walnut, North Carolina. A few paragraphs can give the gist of those lives. Mark moved to California and Minnesota and Nashville. I moved to Nashville, back to North Carolina and then back to Nashville again. Our paths crossed there for a period of five years or so, although it seemed much longer than that. And then I left, returning to Nashville often at first but then less and less as the years moved on and Mark and I moved into different lives.
We summarize the little lives we live within our lives. I lived in the home where I grew up for 22 years, more or less. One stretch of chronological time. But how many lives lived within that period? A life as son, brother, cousin, grandson. A life lived with the White Water Band. A life lived on the basketball court. A life lived with friends at school and on the backroads and in the city. A life lived alone in the mountains. A life lived with God in church and on Glory Ridge. All of these lives taking place at the same time, different experiences woven together to make the big-picture life I can summarize in a few paragraphs if necessary.
Every period of life is like that, more or less.
This morning I was sitting at Jones OK Tires, waiting for my tires to be rotated and my oil to be changed. As I sat there suffering the aural and ideological assault of FOX News, in trying otherwise to occupy my mind, I was thinking about food. Well, not about food specifically. More about eating. I thought about breakfast, how in another life lived over five years or so in Nashville, Mark and I--and often several other friends--were together for breakfast almost every day. Right about the time I was at Jones, we would've been at DJ's Deli or at Mrs. Winner's. And I thought about how that part of my life, the breakfast part, is most often spent alone these days, eating cereal in the pre-dawn darkness before I wake the rest of my household (except for the cat, who is already awake and crying for me to pay some attention to his empty bowl). I thought about lunch and wondered whether or not I would return to Barberitos today for the first time since getting sick two weeks ago. (I did.) And lunch put me in mind of a period during which I ate with a friend once a week for almost a year. And then that stopped, and I never knew why. That question often haunts me when I'm sitting in my window seat at Barberitos, watching the lunch crowd come and go. All this to say, we do the same things daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, but the lives in which we do them change, changing the activities themselves.
So, I've been thinking about birthdays and deaths, illness and vacation, memories of the past and plans for the future. And farewells to friends leaving in the midst of lives we've shared, causing their lives and mine to undergo "a sea-change . . . into something rich and strange." (Shakespeare, or something close to it, from The Tempest.)
In spite of all life's ups and downs, I'm glad to be deeply into it with all the rest:
Empty islands, we may be,
But we're anchored all together in the sea. . . .
We summarize the circumstances and movements that make up the life we recognize as ours during any given period. Mark lived in Korea. I lived in Walnut, North Carolina. A few paragraphs can give the gist of those lives. Mark moved to California and Minnesota and Nashville. I moved to Nashville, back to North Carolina and then back to Nashville again. Our paths crossed there for a period of five years or so, although it seemed much longer than that. And then I left, returning to Nashville often at first but then less and less as the years moved on and Mark and I moved into different lives.
We summarize the little lives we live within our lives. I lived in the home where I grew up for 22 years, more or less. One stretch of chronological time. But how many lives lived within that period? A life as son, brother, cousin, grandson. A life lived with the White Water Band. A life lived on the basketball court. A life lived with friends at school and on the backroads and in the city. A life lived alone in the mountains. A life lived with God in church and on Glory Ridge. All of these lives taking place at the same time, different experiences woven together to make the big-picture life I can summarize in a few paragraphs if necessary.
Every period of life is like that, more or less.
This morning I was sitting at Jones OK Tires, waiting for my tires to be rotated and my oil to be changed. As I sat there suffering the aural and ideological assault of FOX News, in trying otherwise to occupy my mind, I was thinking about food. Well, not about food specifically. More about eating. I thought about breakfast, how in another life lived over five years or so in Nashville, Mark and I--and often several other friends--were together for breakfast almost every day. Right about the time I was at Jones, we would've been at DJ's Deli or at Mrs. Winner's. And I thought about how that part of my life, the breakfast part, is most often spent alone these days, eating cereal in the pre-dawn darkness before I wake the rest of my household (except for the cat, who is already awake and crying for me to pay some attention to his empty bowl). I thought about lunch and wondered whether or not I would return to Barberitos today for the first time since getting sick two weeks ago. (I did.) And lunch put me in mind of a period during which I ate with a friend once a week for almost a year. And then that stopped, and I never knew why. That question often haunts me when I'm sitting in my window seat at Barberitos, watching the lunch crowd come and go. All this to say, we do the same things daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, but the lives in which we do them change, changing the activities themselves.
So, I've been thinking about birthdays and deaths, illness and vacation, memories of the past and plans for the future. And farewells to friends leaving in the midst of lives we've shared, causing their lives and mine to undergo "a sea-change . . . into something rich and strange." (Shakespeare, or something close to it, from The Tempest.)
In spite of all life's ups and downs, I'm glad to be deeply into it with all the rest:
Empty islands, we may be,
But we're anchored all together in the sea. . . .
posted by mac | 3:22 PM
7 Comments:
Great post Michael. I miss those days at DJ's and Mrs W. I too drink my coffee alone in the morning most of the time now as I listen to the babble first on NPR and then watch the comedy of FOX News. Change is hard, change is good. Change is what God brings to keep us challenged.
Keep up the great work you do and try not to listen to NPR too much. It'll warp the brain!
Thanks, Mark. I listen to NPR when I wake up, but that's about it these days. (It gets "snoozed" a lot.) Most of the time my car radio is tuned to whatever rock-and-roll the boy with me wants to listen to.
Thank you both for sharing. I really thought that I had nothing interesting to write down until I started blogging and reading other blogs. Now I realize that the sharing of a life is interesting and that other lives have changed as much as mine....... Thank you Michael, thank you Mark. Thank you Dennis for getting me started. Love, john
Michael, I've gotten so fed up with radio and TV that I pretty much watch ESPN, The History Channel, The Learning Channel and HGTV! In my car, I'm never in it long enough to care what it's tuned to!
Thanks John...this is a good way to look back so that we look ahead to all the Lord has for us as we share our lives with each other. Blessings!
I agree with Mark, I just can not listen to the news anymore or watch televison except for the sports channels and discovery channels. I am so impacted by the bad news out there, it effects me physically. Right now I need happiness, had to much of the other, so, yes, it will probably isolate me from reality...but I will be able to survive.
This was a wonderful post, Michael. YOu should use it in one of those books you have locked inside you. I think it would make a good introduction or epigraph. The notion of our living different lives in succession resonates. It is so universal.
Great comment Roz, I wish I knew what it meant! Perhaps it is something to do with Plato.!
Dennis
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