HarveySarles.com

Hardened, I, we, to the possibilities of hard times, of accidents, exigencies, sickness, nastiness, loneliness – whatever. Always surprised: never surprised. Each day magnified to an equal portion with all of life, it’s all amazing. Each sadness hurts, still, as we know well how to find the places of hurt within us, and how to milk them for all they may be worth. Also, the happinesses. It all seems fair within the game of life’s chances.

What hurts so deeply, still, and for which there has been…can be, no hardening, no feelings powerful enough to dwell within, are the sicknesses and accidents which overtake our children.

Not prepared; there is no preparation I know or want to know. My…responsibility? No possible justice here. Somehow it is my fault, our fault, that they are here. Their lives should be…easy, unattacked, not their fault? How silly.

I understand, almost adjust to life’s shortenings, accepting the worst in my life’s (im)possibilities. It’s the part that comes afterward; whatever is young, whatever has sustained me thus far, that seems like it should be, should remain simple and clean: parents sicken and die; children live.

Like I somehow own the germs and viruses, have fought them, bought them off. They have tricked me, made my child ill, and there’s nothing I can do beyond helping breathe into them, the breaths of the life I know, and hope it works…still.

We are old, our children young. It seems unfair, horrible, against the very principles of life, that they might be at great risk. And what to do…in case the worst…happens.

Training; seduction? Early talent told to do something? Interesting; important?  Poor visualization, no talent for the geometric until seen? A memory of proportion, and ears that loved hearing, what is one to do…in life?

To be new upon this earth, to be the first, to do something, to think something no one else ever had, a new idea, a new, new…

At war in the institutionalized knowledge of this age with the sense that walls and cloisters should cast upon the tomes which exist already, a sense of enduringness, and of an importance which pales…to the mind which wants to be new, new.

What good, old? To certify what is new, what is original, raised to an epic battle between the deities which are already and those waiting to be born.

She pursued a life’s career with savvy and good will.  At one point she became the leader and director and maker of many decisions that affected the people under her.  She was the pipeline to policy and on the end of telephones galore; discussing, deciding, telling, thinking.

After many years, approaching the years of possible wisdom, a time when knowledge might be distilled from knowing, she became somewhat famous. Being known far and wide, she changed tactics, changed her career, became a doer in…in the inner circle…in… in the wider arena.

She had become powerful.

Powerful! The word rang and buzzed in her being, that she was powerful.  She could enter larger arenas, make her world better, even good, within some visions that she worked at; having and being. She discovered within a certain sense of flattery and adulation, that she was powerful, that her fame had propelled her peripherally; that she was operating in a place which had a great deal to do, but could do nothing because it was all honorific there.

And so she bolted, and began to rethink.

The conundrum:  having become powerful she had lost most of her power.

In a world, in a time when the idea of virtue is mostly absent, when the heroic is the sole property of the juvenile in each of us, when winning and losing is expressed only within what we deem “games,” or we worry that we all will lose, then adversity becomes a central test of life and of character.

Here losing is what is normal, obvious and clear, winning is overcoming or rebounding or living in the stoicism of not caring. Adversity becomes the sole measure of morality when virtue is so immature.

The only moral question remains: shall I seek adversity so it may be overcome? Where did everything positive disappear: progress, hope, futurity, or becoming. Life itself was cast chimerically – life…is but a dream; and cast ironically – life’s solutions to its own problems were to make life, itself, appear to be an illusion.

Only adversity is not an illusion. Only adversity is experiential and only its overcoming is real. The search for adversity now becomes the sole vestige of what is real; its overcoming, a necessity to bring it on, again.

What once was moral fiber, resolutely cast in the concretisms of fear and awe, turned now upon its backside, asking to be slapped like a new babe once more, to cry so it may live.

In love with adversity, such that life may test, that fail or pass, we will have lived.

Sometimes, usually, I want my life to be filling in each moment so I will be full. Somehow, often, when I begin to feel that the fullness of my life is near the top, I want to let it all go, so I may be as empty as living will permit, yet go on.

At other times, in other modes and moods, I lose track and want both; to be full, to be empty, in the same, in each, moment. I used to think this seeming paradox was about fatigue: to do, to become tired, to sleep, to become renewed, to do, to…

Now, older: too many fatigues, too difficult to explain as some linear process. Now, older: too many fatigues that told me I would be more empty than I now am.

Full on empty, I remain open to everything that is, that I can hear and feel and see, each day anew. Full on empty, I may yet afford to pander to the curiosities of experience.