I am starting to fear silence again, filling it with sound, running from whatever my head or heart is trying to tell me. Does this happen to you?
These are the moments when I cannot sit still. My eyes move from place to place. My skin itches. I must jump up and fill the time before….before what? What could my inner self have to say that so frightens my outer self?
In the past, these moments have led to insight. In the past, these moments meant personal growth. But what am I supposed to learn this time?
I feel too old to learn, too sure of the knowledge that my time has passed. I am walking slowly toward death, my own, my loved ones but death nonetheless.
Maybe it’s the coming of winter, the rare October snow we just had. Maybe it’s the approach of daylight savings — long, dark afternoons into longer, darker nights. Maybe it’s my feeling that I am no longer the all powerful wizard of my early days, the one with all the answers.
Maybe it’s because I fear this lesson has much broader implications.
The future keeps crowding into the present – the outside world into my small, sweet corner of it. Our world, the world I grew up in, the world we hippies and peaceniks changed, the world we loved, was proud of, is disappearing.
Spinning faster and faster away from me, it has moved on its axis to a place of, “I’ve got mine; the rest of you, go away.” This world is a foreign place for me and I hold no answers on how to fix it.
How I wish I was still that wizard of my younger years and able to make the coming years as rich and warm for my daughter and grandchildren as they were for me. How I wish the future would not loom on the ever darkening horizon of financial woes, economic downturns. How I wish our “elected officials” would actually do more to earn their pay and less to get re-elected.
Politicians have lost their way. Honor no longer goes with the job; passion for what’s right, not what’s personally enriching has disappeared, replaced by greed and guile.
Perhaps this is the lesson I am being forced to learn — there is no easy way out of this huge and frightening mess our country is in, no easy way to close the gap between the ridiculously rich and the grindingly poor. Perhaps politicians should have to face only one test to run for office.
Do they have a terminal illness?
If only the dying were allowed to run for office, maybe, just maybe it might help them focus on what’s truly important instead of what’s expedient.
