Living in Imperfect Fractions of Time

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CW: Suicide

You may have noticed that I’ve been missing these past two weeks - my apologies if you’ve come to rely on a Whole Stories read every Sunday. I’m going through something of a life reset - the advent of the New Year is the time for it, after all, but this year the process is asking more of me than I expected. My vision of my future seems to have inverted itself but that story must wait for another time.

Late last summer, when I set out on a year-long adventure, my intention was to write and travel, and to explore ideas for living the late autumn season of my life. At the heart of my inquiry are questions about belonging—where, doing what, and with whom.

I arrived at the holy nights of December pleased and fulfilled by what had so far unfolded. But ‘The Holidays’ can be a tricky time for contemplating your life’s purpose and direction—cut from the anchors of routine, riding tides of merriment that are freighted with longing for a past that is as improbable as the future. How many of us are where we thought or hoped we’d be this time last year?

I find myself feeling detached as January settles in; the past is prologue, but I’ve lost sight of the story I wanted to tell. There is something of that floaty feeling in this observation1 by author Andrew Grieg:

It is not nostalgia, this feeding on air as certain plants do. It seems our roots are in the invisible.

A few days before Christmas, a young man I knew came home from college and ended his life. He was 22. He went to school with my son, and I hadn’t seen him in several years, but in the photo posted by his mother, he looked still the same.

Perhaps his jaw had grown more stubborn with his maturity, but he was the same beautiful boy who walked around their seaside farm, a bounce in his toes as if they were springs. Shoes didn’t suit him, and even his favorite clothes seemed like reluctant acquaintances. His pale arms and skinny legs told an epic tale in scrapes and scabs and yellowing bruises. He was wild as a river, running swift and deep, held by banks of good earth. My heart breaks for his dear parents.

I messaged my son in California, remembering when they patrolled the beach on hopeful summer days, a feed bucket ready on the rocks as they searched for overlooked wonders.

I told my son, “I love you.” I told him, “This is a brutal time of year with all the fake happy, and ‘life is great’ vibes. Don’t fall for that shit.” I know he already knows, but I told him anyway because I couldn’t think of anything else I could do. I couldn’t pin my ideas of a bright future to the life of a boy who found none.

It seems to live deep in our culture, the idea that happyness lies ahead, and healing means moving on, as if we should leave our past and its wounds by the side of the road—as if that’s a valid possibility.

I was 17 when my brother died unexpectedly. People who should have been wiser than me shook their heads sympathetically and said, “You just never know. Life is short—seize the day, don’t waste it”. But isn’t that how my brother lost his life? An off-the-cuff adventure with a friend, the rush of a ride on the new motorcycle—the sudden bend taken too fast. And now that summer day will never end because it can’t be forgotten.

Back then, I was still numb and wading through grief. I couldn’t live as if tomorrow were an uncertain thing—life was already too messy and exhausting. There is a thin line between being a ‘free spirit’ and being lost like an untethered kite. Our entanglements ground us: ties to time and place, friction becomes traction so our lives can gain momentum. The flow of our days catches us by our edges and spins us forward—bruising and breakage is part of the journey.

I’ve come to view the wreckages in my life as quiet travel companions. I glimpse them in my peripheral vision, living a kind of life of their own—a subtle shifting that happens slowly over the years. The past as artifact, details in the landscape that let me know where I am.

My reset isn’t over, and I don’t yet know exactly where I’m headed. But I do know that—for now—I am tied to the right place at the right time, and that’s something.

I leave you with this beautifully poignant poem by Norman MacCaig

Beside one loch, a hind’s neat skeleton,
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather:
Two things already dead and still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or the spitting grey,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.

Time adds one malice to another one —
Now you’d look very close before you knew
If it’s the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.

From the Collected Poems of Norman MacCaig

1

Quote from At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Grieg: part personal memoir, part appreciation of the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig.

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