My convoluted thinking…
I woke up today to the view of 2 circles: the rising sun and the lingering moon. I thought of that carousel of life, the circle game. So I pondered about a washing machine, that I watched -mesmerized- the other day.
Why? Because it kept spinning right about two circles, but kept twirling left about 3 times, and then turning right again another 2 circles. And on and on for half an hour.
My mind was spinning as well, as I was reading yet about another circle (Solzhenitsyn’s In The First Circle), and reflected about my own life that sometimes has spun forward once or twice, and then backwards three or four times! And on and on.
For some reason, when I went back to read, the pages had flipped back to the beginning, to the Russian author’s note. I was struck with what he said about his novel,
“ In order to give it even a feeble life, to dare show it, and to bring it to a publisher, I myself shortened and distorted it—or, rather, took it apart and put it together anew, and it was in that form that it became known. And even though it is too late now, and the past cannot be undone—here it is, the authentic one. By the by, while restoring the novel, there were parts that I refined: after all, I was forty then, but am fifty now.”
Well, we cannot change our past, but old age gives us a chance to refine it! Of course, with some caveats. I do believe in karma, so you can’t really go quite “tabula rasa”.
That washing machine day happened to be my Father-in-Law’s birthday. He would have been 102 years old. He died at 70, way too young nowadays. So, looking at today’s circles on a beautiful morning, I thought of him, and the other old dead relatives of mine, and how strange the whole cycle of life is. Nasty surprises always await around a corner.
I am reminded of my poor Father who at 77 years of age went to buy his New York Times early one morning, strolling down his favorite sidewalk in his little town, only to be hit by an out of control Mercedes Benz, and ended up seriously injured for almost half a year. His big thick head cracked the windshield, and the totaled car cracked his bones. Yet, he recovered and lasted another 10 years.
One never knows when we will get either clobbered and wiped out, or get the news that our days are numbered.
The other day I took my dogs for a walk, and they instinctively went chasing after a flock of little white birds, and made me fall and dragged me a few inches. I didn’t break anything, but it was quite a wake up call. As my younger brothers jokingly said, “well, this is how it all starts, right? A broken bone that doesn’t heal and then POOF, that’s it!”. Never fails to have younger brothers with a macabre sense of humor.
I have always been attuned to serendipity, and lo and behold, I am reading various articles this morning, after my encounter with the circles, and came across a Psalm I had never read, and one section stood out:
“Seventy is the sum of our years,
or eighty if we are strong,
and most of them are fruitless toil,
for they pass quickly and we drift away” (Ps 90:10)
Old age, the carousel of life, the circle game, the fruitless toils, the alpha and the omega, birth and death, the seasons in between, the sun and the moon on a glorious Maine Sunday morning. Life is beautiful!
Dum Spiro Spero 