At the Still Point of the Turning World
The ebbs and flows in a single lifetime are a haiku. A brief flicker of light just three billion heartbeats deep and seventeen syllables long.
In that context of a life the search for some form of confirmation that we matter is a natural quest for any sentient being. It involves untangling episodes from the past and the present in ways that make sense of the future - a field of nascent energy holding our greatest potential.
Only that which is yet to come can fulfil the oaths we made to ourselves when we were permanently young. The pledge to our parents that we would live an extraordinary life. The promise of a life charged with hope and with all manner of possibilities.
But hope is an elusive sigh. From time to time the urge to reflect on events long past grows into an aching lament. Catching us by surprise it can displace the tedium of trying, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute to find vestiges of assurance in a future that is crashing in on our every moment, and a present that drifts further out of reach.
Nostalgia can be the most seductive of liars. Memories do not even partially resemble the truth. Subjective, transient and illusory, they are fabricated afresh each time we reminisce from scattered debris that happens to drift across our path. Perhaps a scent wafting on the breeze, a whispered word, falling leaves, a fleeting shadow, a billowing mushroom cloud.
Yet these recollections are often cradled within a salve of security and continuity that is palpably reassuring. A sacred space. A remembrance that life evolves, was not always as it is now, and will wax and wane again before we take our next breath.
Such observations, however elusive, help keep us grounded. They provide a sense of awe, yet also identity and purpose, mindful that we are stardust and part of something infinitely more expansive and enduring than our egocentric frailties, uncertainties and misgivings.
Lingering in the past can be a form of meditation. A communing with our ancestors and their unknowable appreciation of the universe and the planet we now call Earth. Caressed only from within the sequestered radiance of prevailing pleasures and a desire for more material wealth, however, is an indulgence we can least afford. Yet that mystery too is a part of discovering who we are and being able to live life to the full.
The experiences of learning, parenting, travelling and aging, of acquiring perhaps a little wisdom through all of these, still fails to bring to light much of a utopian future.
There can be no singularity melding human and machine without accompanying birth pangs, no rapturous paradise, no post-civilizational worldview, no transcendent cause to unite the human family, if we fail to craft these from the soul as well as the mind.
Only a world that turns on its dark side once more. Raucous, painful, mean and chaotic, accelerating towards the kind of forlorn nightmare scarcely imagined in the Hell of Hieronymous Bosch or in the eyes of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But there are shards of stars in us all. Hope is not yet abandoned. Love is the strongest force in all the universe. And hope is love’s covenant. Even our present moments may be memories we have only briefly forgotten.