I’m at a point in life now where I feel like I’m running through a metaphorical tunnel which is collapsing at one end.
I don’t think it’s about to crush me, but I am aware that my past is being systematically destroyed with age. When I look back down the tunnel I know that places I grew up are no longer there, houses I lived in have been demolished, schools I went to are no longer schools, businesses where I worked are no longer trading, and the big one; people I’ve loved are no longer living.
The speed at which the collapse is occurring is increasing and I’m having to run faster to stay ahead. It doesn’t seem at all fair, and what am I running towards, the light? What is the point? I don’t know.
I do know that it ultimately will catch up to me and I’ll be crushed too, and I hope that when that happens there is something left of me in the world that lingers. For my mother’s recent death there isn’t much more than memories, and a few photos. The sum total of her life’s work has been my brother and me, and maybe that’s enough!
I want something more however, something to say “I was here”. I know I’ll never be famous or rich, but I do crave some indelible mark on the world beyond my own children, just not sure how to go about it. It has to be positive and I’d like to help others, kind of to defy the total collapse of my tunnel and leave a segment of it standing, like an old brick folly.
I’ve learned a lot about human consciousness through this process, as I always thought that the destruction of people or places negated them to leave a person with a void in their mind that they had to endure, and this is not true. My house that was demolished lives on in my memory and nothing can destroy my remembering it. It is still there, forever in mind, and that would also be true if it was still standing.
So the loss of the real thing is not the same as the loss of memory, and I imagine that would be the only way to truly destroy it and have it no longer feed into my person as a variable making up the whole of my structure. The impact of the past on my present is as strong today as it was at the time it existed as the present, it is immutable and therefore it doesn’t lessen who I am with its loss.
It’s interesting that I’ve not ever been taught this, as it seems like a simple truth about life, and it feels almost like a spiritual view that I’m not aware of in any religious text. I’m sure it would bring great comfort to many people to know that the loss of a loved one, doesn’t take away that love and this should be taught from a young age. It just persists as if the person is still alive, and perhaps this is better than say a person changing and no longer loving you, as it now cannot become anything else.
It is forever unchanging!