A while back, a very dear friend said to me, ‘there is no meantime, there is only now.’ This was on the verge of his departure, and came at a particularly apt moment in time for me. Shortly after he left, a number of things happened. Rooster & I bought our plane tickets (for August '08). We took hold of the monthly budgeting, determined to make this happen. We began getting rid of the stuff that takes up space, physical & mental, and generally paring down to what we’ll take with us on our backs.
But like the fable of the grasshopper & the ant, there’s a potential trap in all this planning and looking ahead: namely, what sort of life does the ant lead for all those months of toil? (Bear with me on this one =) It reminds me of a sermon I heard not so long ago about being preoccupied: if we allow ourselves to focus so intensely on some future event that it occupies our time & mental energies in the present, we sacrifice the present (real, happening, now) to the future (potential, uncertain, then). As our language suggests, we let something of the future occupy ourselves before it is even realized: we are pre-occupied by it. An acquaintance once described to me how in Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, one of the uncle devil’s most sage pieces of advice to his nephew demon (for securing the souls of human beings) is to trick them into living in the future, in focusing on the not-yet realized, into a pre-occupied existence that relegates the present to a transit, a necessary getting-your-house-in-order, a meantime. “In the meantime, I’m…”
Paradoxically, we (generally) exist in a world where we do, in fact, need to get our houses in order. An excess of exuberance may lead us to forget crucial necessities (it’s theoretically acceptable to live in a hut in the woods, but how exactly are you going to eat? Even Thoreau had a marketplace nearby…), yet a dearth of exuberance is premature death for the human-more-than-being: I could never quit my job & move to China...
Ok, so one needs to maintain a balance of practicality and spontaneity. Sacrifice the one completely to the other, and life can be very short-lived indeed. However, sacrifice the other to the one, and the grass is confined to the cracks in the pavement: an over-worked, under-appreciated, un-lived-in life.
Which leads me back to my initial question: if I had to assess the greater danger, whether we suffer or are threatened more by an excess of practicality or of spontaneity, it’s clear to me that we live in the shadow of the everyday death more than that permanent shuttering of eyes. Amid the present resurgence of pragmatism, all recent gains of the imaginative soul by way of reaction against efficiency seem so many miniscule sandbags against a rising flood. Confronted with the pseudo-scientific evisceration of even love & romance, the heart must flee the neurologist’s nano-scalpel & the psychoanalyst’s probing presumptions for the wild regions of an untamed world where death may come in the form of a cougar attack or an overlooked pricker-cut but the moment is full and unhindered by drugs or magazines or worse. As the poet lamented, we "would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain," and I say in reply, better to walk barefoot across the desert & cast your watch into the raging sea at its end.
Somewhere not so deep inside me there still lives a young boy who is completely taken with life; who climbs the backyard apple tree to chat with a wise old friend; who battles orcs & ogres with what weapons he finds or fists & cunning if need be; who sees castles in banks of dirt-encrusted snow and an endlessly thrilling game against death in the crashing of waves on the sand; who loves & cries without thought or man-made reason; who trusts implicitly; who flies like a particle of light across the vasty deep in the hours between gloaming and breakfast; who has seen the Great White Tiger that stalks the woods behind his house, the glimpses of which are enough to stick his sneakered feet to the ground in fear mixed with dread excitement.
I still know that feeling, a trembling like a high-voltage current of electricity charging beneath my skin, raising all the hairs on my body and sounding alarums in my heart:
Springtime is a-comin in,and summer's soon to follow.
I must live all I can today—
I've never lived tomorrow.
Of maps & globe, lists and itineraries, stories & pictures I've read and looked at all I care to. In the only important ways, I’m ready. This waiting may be the worst part and most dangerous.
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