Unlike physical pain, emotional injuries are abstractions. They consist of interpretations of intellectual encounters. They express one’s understanding of experience through a unique filter. They are responses to circumstances—mental acrobatics driven by unseen forces. Though they arise from the imagination, emotional injuries can be just as damaging as gashes made to the flesh and as painful as the mark left by a red-hot branding iron. But they are invisible and impossible to measure with precision. Oh, they can leave evidence, but never enough for us to know, with certainty, the source of the scars.
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It’s not the prose and poetry I envy. And it’s not the sculptor’s finished figure. It’s not the products I envy. It’s the mind from whence they spring, the mind that recognizes the chaos in clarity and the clarity in confusion. [A slight modification to something I wrote more than 11 years ago…something I stumbled upon and instantly remembered. Odd, I think, that passing moments can leave indelible marks on the memory.]
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Republics will blame Democrats for solar flares. Democrats will blame Republicans for near-misses by asteroids. I blame the sky for the colors I see in the morning, the hues hidden by grey clouds and the impenetrable mist of memories. French mercenary soldiers blame language interpreters for the Icelandic translation mistakes that lead to surrender. There is enough blame to go around; everyone can have an ample share of culpability. But praise is always in short supply.
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With or without plans, the future unfolds in the same way. The future already exists, like the chicken embryo comfortably in its shell, waiting for the egg to crack. Whether the mother hen envisions her chick covered in garish orange and purple feathers or she imagines it in simple white, the outcome has already been established. It’s not predetermined, it is just the way it is. Neither dye nor bleach after hatching changes reality. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” It doesn’t matter; the cycle takes place with or without an answer.
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The phrase “children without parents” is easy to understand, though it could be interpreted in various ways. But the phrase “parents without children” is universally understand as nonsense…though it could be twisted into meaning it was never meant to have.
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Two or three or four generations from now, today’s parents will be permanently forgotten. I will be expunged from history much more quickly. There is nothing inherently sad about that reality. It is simply a fact that time has been repeated since the beginning of parenthood and its absence.
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Joy is temporary insanity. Nothing is inherently joyous, is it? Then again, no behavior or experience is inherently insane, either. Every experience must be measured against another one that looks, feels, and smells differently. Yes, smells.
