If you are only living your life to pay off your bills, what are you living for? Like a slave lives to please -- or at least not unplease -- his master? Hanging on with a Pit Bull grip to a job that barely keeps your head above water? I guess that you can at least say...that your head is still above water....There are too many 'Titanic-like' scenes out there....not winning the war against the water....
Where is the meaning here? Where is the passion? In simply doing anything and everything you can to survive?
Where is your creative Self? Is it being actualized in your work? Or is it being buried in your work? Where is your mind while you work? In your work? Or trying to escape your work? Are you Kafka working in an insurance company? Doestevsky who wants to bring you passionate notes from the Underground. Are you Camus who wakes up one day and feels that you have lived your whole life as The Stranger? Or feels yourself on Trial -- for living a life that you didn't live?
There are a generation of Baby Boomers who have already entered -- or are in the process of entering -- Senior Citizinship, and for this generation -- My Generation -- the Day of Reckoning has come....The Day of The Trial....
Did you accomplish what you set out to accomplish? Did you fufill a good chunk of your life goals? Are you with the man or woman you want to be with? Are your kids off to a good start in life, encouraged by the wisdom you left them? Do your grandchildren add sweetness, innocence, energy, and trial and error curiosity to your life?
Or did you get sidetracked somewhere? Down some wrong path? Sidetracked by addiction? By a man or woman at the office? Sidetracked by spending too much time at work...and not enough time at home? Somehow you were not there to guide your children through school and play, reading and writing, the sports games that you both loved and hated, but didn't share with your children? Your children idealized, and idolized you, even when you weren't the perfect father or mother....Did you let their image of you slip away, become jaded, by just not being there for them, one, two, or maybe even a hundred or a thousand, too many times? You were trying too hard to pursue other goals in your life...and perhaps looking back at it now....would have made an extra effort to have made yourself more available for their needs than you were?
Or not? We all have things we can look back at and smile about....cherish....and then the other half of the things that we missed while we were doing what we did....
Can we look back at things now and say that we captured the main essence of what we wanted? Or did we miss a significant part of the main essence of what we wanted?
I drive a wheel-chair van now, have been doing so for the last month.
This has been an eye-opening experience for me.
A heart-wrenching experience for me. Inside, I cry sometimes after hearing another story....
The young man who was paralzyed by a drunk driver...
Lots of stroke patients....Way too many stroke patients....One man whispers into my ear as I take him to the door. 'I don't want to be here any longer than I have to be...But I just can't remember anything....' I left him inside the door of an Alzeimer's Society....
Lots of dialysis patients.....A patient with a horror story that made me quiver...Diagnosed with the early signs of colon cancer, he had his colon taken out....a month or two later he had pneumononia and didn't even know it....His primary symptom that finally took him to a hospital was shortness of breath...a smoker with developing emphysema...but this was different...He collapsed in the hospital...and woke up two months later from a coma....Septic poisoning had invaded his bloodstream and when he woke up he found that his kidneys didn't work any longer....and that he would have to wear an oxygen mask...He now goes to dialysis five days a week. The coma episode was about six years ago.
The stroke victim who was just too addicted to alchohol...I see these types of men very frequently as I take them home from work to a men's shelter....They have lost their wives or girlfriends, their homes, their families, say that they are going to get help, enter a rehab program, and the next day....when I pick them up....they are stinking drunk again....Will power isn't the same as fantasy power...
The stroke victim I started to tell you about...same story...lost his wife, home, and family to alcohold addiction....contemplated suicide...prayed to God to relieve him from his insanity...and the next day he had his stroke...He never drank again...but lives in a residential home owned by nuns....takes dialysis...The good part is that he has rediscovered his wife and kids....and thanks God for that...feels in his heart that he got a better deal and a second chance at life...
Tragedy, traumacy, and in some cases, a decent resolution....
That is what I see all day....
And think about for at least a good part of the night...
Every new job...
As much as you may resent certain elements of it....
Also contains the possibility of a new Awakening...
A twinging of the heart strings...
Of The Stranger Inside...
-- dgb, June 15th, 2011,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
