Saturday, June 8, 2013

feet, heart, eyes, memory

It has been some time.  It has been a time.  Sometimes too much is happening, sometimes whatever is happening is difficult to express.  It is June, and 2013 has seemed long despite the fast pace of life now.

In January, I went to Maine to visit my parents in their new home.  We had to take my sister to Newark to leave for her semester abroad, and on the drive back we stopped in Connecticut, to drive through the little town where I spent the first nine years of my life.  I have not been back since then, and though much has changed, I felt as though I was looking through my old eyes, my young eyes.  In my head I could hear the music that used to play in the tape deck of our old Honda as my mom would drive me to the library or dance class or school (Paul Simon's "Graceland," Steve Winwood, Bruce Hornsby, Eric Clapton).  While they have added on to and remodeled parts of my old elementary school, looking at the playground, and the walk between the science building and the main building, flooded my mind with memories of simple childhood games and adventures.  And when we stopped to see our old house, the current dwellers were home and invited us inside.  Stepping through that doorway was incredibly emotional, and I was hit with the realization that my feet had walked on this floor before.  My feet, my body, had been there, a little version of me, of who I am, of my essence, was inside that house with me.  And that happens everywhere, everywhere we go that isn't brand new (to us) has known us, holds a part of our souls, and is marked with the tread of our feet.  Little versions of my brother, sister and I had run around that house (it seemed so big to us then), and younger versions of my parents loved us and taught us how to be good humans (we are trying to keep doing that, I do think).  It was the location of birthday parties and Christmas miracles and bad dreams.  We cried, we laughed, we lived and breathed in that place, and though we have grown up and moved elsewhere, I had the sense that that house still remembered me, still remembered our time there.  It may sound silly, but I do think that places remember us, or perhaps it is we who recognize ourselves in the air, in time and space.  Nothing is ever lost, if we hold it close in our hearts and memories.  The past was at one time the present, and this present moment will someday be a past we remember, it disappears second by second, but each moment exists and shapes us.  I get overwhelmed when I think of all this - that each moment holds potential and each decision could be life altering.  I am in love with life and it causes me such anxiety all at once.

I went back to New York City for a wedding last weekend.  I flew there exactly one year to the day that I flew away, which was interesting, and, if I choose to look at it this way, symbolic.  Perhaps it is everything else that occupies my brain right now, but as soon as the plane touched down, I was ready to leave.  I was happy to be there to celebrate my dear friend Kathy's happy day, and to see some people whom I miss and love greatly.  But I had an almost immediate reaction of relief that I only had to be there for two days.  "Belonging" is a difficult subject, a difficult word, a feeling I have searched for, and will search for indefinitely.  I do not know exactly where I belong, but I am able to see where I do not belong, and to have that feeling about New York surprised me.  I had an overwhelming feeling of not wanting to live there, of being glad that I left, and feeling confident in my decision to move.  It is odd, because I rarely feel confident about choices, so this also surprised me, and to be honest, worried me, and I probably lost a bit of confidence from that concern.  Places once called home in that city are still there, of course, but they aren't my home anymore.  Yet it is like I said before, my feet have walked and my body and mind have existed in these places, so a part of me is there, even though my current self is somewhere else.  And my eyes see the same things in different ways - much the opposite to the feelings I had about my little home in Connecticut.  Is it because this place was a part of my adult life and the other was a part of my childhood?  Perhaps it is more difficult to be nostalgic when the experiences are still so raw and influential to our current lives.

As we grow up (which I do not think we ever finish doing), if we are open to it, we can learn new things about ourselves.  We can grow and change while still being the essence of who we have always been, and those changes can be subtle and vast, and everywhere in between.    The difficulty lies in the acceptance of these changes, especially if they surprise you, shock you, or challenge you.  There are some things about myself I always assumed were one way, and I fought against the change.  I was embarrassed by some of the new thoughts, some of the new desires and hopes.  I was afraid.  I am still afraid of many things, but there are parts of me that I recognize now and am choosing to try to celebrate and treasure, to cultivate and honor.  My yearning for simplicity, in comparison to the ideas I used to have about my life and who I am, just requires different methods and different goals.  My dreams are still the same - altered, but the same.  I have heard that our twenties are the time to learn who we are, to discover ourselves, to be open to whatever comes our way.  Seems accurate.

I take random blog notes all the time, and when I look at some of them now, I do not feel the need to write about them because my thoughts have changed or something else has taken priority.  These I will add, however:

You have to want to better yourself, want to pull yourself out of the fog and the sadness.  Of course you know there are many things you can do to pull yourself out, but what happens when you don't want to?  It can be preferable to wallow and reflect, unable to push for improvement because you are afraid that improvement leads to the acceptance of something that you do not want to accept.


We spend so much of our lives trying to figure out who we are, yet as we try to figure it out we are living who we are each moment, regardless of whether we've figured it out or not.  We think so hard about what we are supposed to do, and who we are supposed to be, but we are who we are no matter what.  If we run and hide and fear the unknown we might as well not do anything.  I have no idea how to combat or overcome this - and I think the search is positive and necessary, but it also can stop us from living and when we stop living for fear we will make the wrong choices, we just stop.

I am at a loss for my own words now, but I will leave you with this, from Julian Barnes' novel, The Sense of an Ending.  

...what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.  We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I've never felt I understood it very well.  And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions.  No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock.  Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?  And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability.  Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.  

As always, I hope my time away from this blog will not be long.  Until next time.

[amanda]