I read this meme somewhere once, long ago. Something like- “I feel like I’m at the point in the RPG when I realize that I put my skill points into all the wrong stuff, but it’s too late to go back and start over” and that really resonated with me, as a nerd who understands even a little bit of what that means.
My brother doesn’t understand my Uncle. My Uncle, who sold me his boat, sold his deer rifle, sold all of his woodshop tools. He doesn’t understand how someone could just give up on all their favorite things in life. There’s some weird competition there. Old rivalry, I think. He doesn’t understand why my uncle seems to be throwing in the towel, because he would never do that, and he feels as though he’s won something there. Feels arrogant to me. Foolish.
Our uncle is not a spry sportsman anymore. He’s a tired old Boomer who has reached a point in his life of almost complete loss. Not much left at all from the bulk of it to keep him company. He sent me a photo recently of him, my dad, and his dad- in his first boat, when I was one year old. They took it out, caught some huge fish, parked the boat on the beach and had a little picnic with a little propane stove. “Good memories” he added in the caption. His dad and my dad being gone, he’s the last living member of those group photos. Odd to think about, considering I knew all of them when they were alive for most of my life as well.
My brother just doesn’t understand that there is no point to fishing or hunting when there’s no one left to share it with. What’s the point of spending all the energy to go out and get a fish or a deer if no one else cares? I’ve spent days doing all sorts of things, completely off the grid, and at the end of the day forgotten it all.
It takes getting older and dwelling in genuine aloneness to understand the last words of that Chris Mckindles (or whatever) kid who died in Alaska cut off by the spring river (Into The Wild).
“Love only real when shared”
The “realness” of Love ebbs and flows across life, I feel, as the people meet and love and lose pass through us in waves. I think back on the years that I’ve worked. And how every year a routine established itself with familiar faces and challenges, and just as soon as I generate solutions and protocols and tools for all of those challenges, the entire world shifts and I never have any need of those solutions and protocols and tools ever again. And all the lads I felt would be my coworkers for life, they all just passed through in a single season, most never to return. Years later a few cameos, but that’s it.
Between this ebbing and flowing of Love and meaning for specific activities and chapters of life, people coming and going, and all the dead end preparations for problems that live exclusively as scar tissue in the past, the world feels like it rolls too fast beneath my feet to keep up with- and I suppose that is true in a figurative sense.
The way I think about the beginning of Fried Green Tomatoes or Forrest Gump once I’m at the end of it.
I can see the world just below the one we live in now in my memories. And I can project a vision of a few of the worlds below that one with some trickery. It makes me wonder what fresh world will soon sit on the one we call Now, and be so dim as to make the light here feel like cozy heaven.
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