Tag: reality

Re: Finite

Some things end. Some things are irreplaceable. Some things are lost forever. Our planet is finite: It has an expiry date. We mere humans do not know when the world will end but it-will-end. Memento mori needs to be part of a school board’s curricula.

In art class I used to enjoy inspiring my students with the thought that their ideas could create infinite possibilities. I never had the heart to tell them to get on with it because their life, in the grand scheme of things, is very short. Procrastination might be something to avoid but it’s easy to get a manyana attitude. A recent film titled The Life of Chuck points out that reality. Here we are shown how preciously fragile humans are, compared to natural processes of more cosmic proportions.

I believe death is absolute; it is final. You may leave pieces of you in your will, your legacy, or in the hearts of others, but otherwise you will vanish. You can only exist for so long: That is what finite means. I had a German-born childhood friend who used to announce the end of things by using a Spanish sounding word: Finito. My mom used to be amused by his casual dismissiveness. Once as we were enjoying P&J sandwiches in my childhood kitchen, and as we came close to the end of the jam Mom said, “When it’s gone, it’s gone!” I like the simplicity of the French word Fin to indicate the end of things. At the end of an artsy film with subtitles, I’ll get a certain comfort when the credits scroll to a completion and FIN is displayed in bold letters telling us it’s over now, time to go home.

Many natural resources can be renewable with the right degree of stewardship. In our nonchalant attitude to climate change we forget that many things are non-renewable. Species themselves are finite. When a certain type of living thing becomes extinct that is a clear end-of-the-line. Despite tales of harvesting DNA to clone bygone beasts as in Jurassic Park filmology, the likelihood that our declining planet can even support another T-Rex is improbable.

My best friend advises me to not squander my time. I know I’m finite. In art, science or politics there is room for your work to live on after you have ceased to be, but we are not immortal in the sense of the roman or greek gods. Historically some cultures have theorized an afterlife. Some had tombs built and their bodies carefully preserved, like the ancient Egyptians, to enable transport to the great beyond. Viking folk believed Valhalla would let them live eternally. I wonder if there are still cryogenic chambers available for 21st century billionaires who imagine a flight to infinity and beyond.

We can’t predict when we’ll expire. Sadly some of us will go before our time, leaving others in shock while they commiserate and consider what the rest of their lives might hold for them. We have a shelf-life. Hopefully we won’t just sit there wondering what comes next.

Re: Shadow

My mom would sometimes answer my persistent childhood questions with, “Only the shadow knows.” She would say it in a spooky voice that gave me the creeps. It was much later that I learned it came from an old-timey radio program, The Shadow, about a vigilante and his female sidekick. I think my mom saw herself as a detective. She even worked part-time with a private eye on divorce cases involving suspicions of adultery. Dark serious stuff.

Shadowing someone sounds sinister. In the modern lexicon it might be described as stalking. But in business settings to shadow someone suggests a new employee watching and learning from someone more senior. As an experienced elementary school teacher I was asked to support newly graduated teachers in a mentorship role. One year I was assigned a policeman who gave up his career due to burnout (he had the grim job of taking crime photos). We had great conversations as he learned the ropes in the sometimes stressful arena of education. When he got a full-time position he honoured me with a poem describing how he had been “a shadow of his former self” before I helped him create a more satisfying work/life balance.

While in a playful mood with my young children I have used my fingers to create shadow puppets on a wall. One son helped me build a sun dial in our back garden to catch the movement of a shadow telling us the time of day. Another son loved how I read an abridged version of Peter Pan. We would playact the scene where Mary stitches a shadow onto Peter’s heels in an effort to ground the never/never boy to reality.

In the film Perfect Days there is a delightfully scene between two drunken middle-aged males playing a game of shadow tag. They exhaust themselves, trying to stamp on each other’s silhouette, then they get philosophical wondering if each other’s grey profile, when overlapping, would produce a darker shadow. It doesn’t get blacker as they hypothesized, which causes even more confusion. Directly and subtly, this intriguing film explores the shadows we cast as we move through our lives. We are led to build our own backstories of the characters in this film, from the brief shadowy references to their past. I love the way we are invited to consider time as fluid, moving gently from sunrise to sundown, until next time becomes now.

When I was a baby I giggled lots when my mom pushed my pram under the dapple of trees. The Japanese word for this speckled shadow from leaves is Komorebi. There is joy in this translation. For me this phoneme suggests the sound of a breeze through branches. It is hard to take a realistic picture of this mysterious play of lightness and shadow. A camera can distinguish light from dark and pick out the hues and tints of colour, yet our eyes measure more. The brain is reacting to what the eyes see as fact, yet life is about shading that perception with our constantly evolving selves. Perhaps answers can only be found amidst the shadows.

Re: Real

My thoughts seemed like a Netflix fantasy series. I started a conversation with my wife one morning saying I was losing my grasp on reality while having trouble making sense of time and space. Pinch me please. Bless her heart, she looked shocked and worried for my mental health. A reset to realism was needed, and quick.

According to much of what I’ve read in the media lately, I’m not alone in feeling abstract. Faulting things, events or individuals for my discombobulation won’t help. My doubts about what is real aren’t about the stuff out there.  It’s more to do with how I’m processing the maddening array of conflicting information. To discover the truth these days I have to reevaluate almost everything I have learned so far in life. I’ve lost my trust in institutions, in the political process, in the weather even. Finding realness and holding on to it is so exhausting!

I watched with incredulity the length of the London queue to view Queen Elizabeth’s coffin. This line up couldn’t be real. What did those half million people need? Grief is real, I think. But standing in the rain, overnight, for twelve hours, surely challenges anyone’s sense of reality. The aged Children Royal stood vigil wearing military regalia similar to a toy soldier set my grandfather once bought for me from Harrods. I imagined costumes for Halloween. Is this an authentic representation of life in 2022? Such disrespectful thoughts! Death is real, I imagine.

Covid19 continues to read like an incomprehensible nonfiction novel. Illness is real, I thought. It seemed that in 2020 many governments were working in the interests of the people yet now we are sternly encouraged to get back to the business at hand; making money. This virus isn’t over and there are more variants expected. So the new normal is really the new reality.

People interviewed after a disaster sometimes say they felt like they were in a movie. They are sharing the shock of an unreal experience while the results of the flood/fire/tornado or other such climate induced mayhem is clear to see, strewn about them. If I’m deciding what’s real based on my past experience, that’s probably a mistake since cryptocurrency doesn’t seem real, Donald Trump wasn’t real, real estate prices aren’t real, reality television isn’t real and global warming is supposedly a hoax.

We are creatures of habit. We like things to be predictable. People who say, ‘embrace the change’ are likely the ones in charge. And the ones in charge don’t appear to know what they’re doing so I resist accepting their version of reality. I’m sounding unrealistic and I realize it. I’m looking for a focal point and I’m coming up lacking. Moments are real, aren’t they?

To summarize: Things aren’t the way they used to be. They never were. The unbelievable can still be real even if it seems crazy. I know I’m not imagining things when my grandchild climbs onto my lap with a big picture book. Love is real, I know that at least.