A CLOSER LOOK AT Dying Wise
Sit on the shore while everything else goes on by you, and get through the low-level anxiety and the boredom and the feeling that you’ve already seen it all. That’s a good time to learn. Here’s what’s there to see.
Everything we do and don’t do makes a wake, a legion of waves and troughs that pound the shores at the edges of what we mean, grinding away on the periphery of what we know. They go on, after the years in which we lived our individual lives are long passed. If we don’t learn that simple, devastating and redeeming detail of being alive—that what we do, all the jangle of our declarations and defeats, lasts longer than we ourselves do, that the past isn’t over—then the parade of our days stands to indict much more than it bequeaths. This is something that we have to learn now. Many of us count on our best intent winning the day or getting us off the hook of personal or ecological consequence. It hasn’t, and it won’t.
This is not true just of people with small boats on small rivers with nowhere to go but back and forth. Everything that is alive and moves in the world, all the winds and worms and wrens and willows leave in their passing some kind of similar wake too. All lives are lived in the swirls and eddies of what has gone along before them. Then, with a little time passing, we ourselves, our lives and all we hold dear, become what has gone before, a swirl or an eddy or both. Things might be different, we could really learn something, if we could see our lives from the shore of Life: “Ah look, there’s my life going by, trailing everything I meant and didn’t mean, the end of it clearly in view.”
Sometimes it’s so clear: time carries everything toward what has been, toward the past. That’s where we’re headed, to join all who have come before. That’s the understanding of time of time.
