A Beginning: June 10, 2019
A blog, and this is my first, is an important venue by which to introduce myself to any potential readers and followers. A website is new to me; it is exciting for it is a search into the future in the starting blocks of here and now. I engage with some fear and trepidation, for while it may be an investigation of our times and circumstances, it is also an exploration of self. Poking inside can be as hazardous as outside, for I believe it was Aristotle who said (and it is the idea that’s important, not the author), “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Scary, we don’t know when to say ‘enough’.
My blogs, then, will be a sharing of personal impressions, views, hopes and fears, book reviews, comments what’s going on out there, favourite pastimes, travels, general expression on what feels good, and who-knows-what-all. The blogs will be a search for honesty on issues so large they are unmanageable and whims so small they will be tiny pleasures.
For example, today I had a link with the past that set me wondering. In that brief link, I was struck that unremarkable moments of the unexpected can the most warming or poignant and even meaningful links in one’s own journey. A man, RD, emailed his birthday to me as he turned 65. Today, I just sent a belated happy birthday to this former student who, having just turned that magic age, has joined me in the universal senior citizens group. Doing that reminded me that at any stage, a coincidental encounter may not be momentary but may have continuity over a long time. I had no idea back in 1968 when I met him at the age of twenty-two as he entered grade nine at fourteen that our good connection back then would be so touching over one half century later. I got a response.
Yes, it was grounding, for by connecting with RD, I feel that in a minute way my history has been a continuity and not a series of abbreviated stops and starts over time, no chance moment or event has been isolated, kept hermetically sealed. As one gets older, looking back is unavoidable, and, at 73, one can do it with a complex of emotions, with affection or bitterness. Every moment, as every memory, counts.
At this age, of the fact that looking forward has a limit, one is soberly aware. However, looking back seems deep and far, for one tends to review one’s own life as would a reviewer of a series, but it’s one’s own transitory existence. So, we wonder. One does so much of this now. One afternoon while taking the dog for his walk through the ravine near my home, I remember sitting in the July heat under a broad, enveloping tree by the bank of a small stream of clear water. In the steady flow, the current carried some debris and bits and pieces of stuff. The water was clean, but the shimmer on the surface prevented me from seeing into the depths. From the river’s edge, I picked up a stone, polished and round with a dappling of browns and black and greens. I rolled it through my fingers and admired its smoothness, an artifact of time. Then, I skipped it three splashes over the surface until it sank below the surface and disappeared into dark oblivion. I followed the last ripples. Inexplicably, my imagination was freed in a settled sense of comfort and a kind of serenity.
These are the times when thoughts and memories and intimations pour through with a presence of their own. They are these affections that I wish to write about. It’s a bit Wordsworth or Keats, I suppose, but it worked for them so I will let these masters be my guide.
Perhaps my quest in this writing is as John Keats discovered in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in 1819:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Join me in the quest.