"it's a strange world we live in Mr. P."
"nothing we can't handle."
"damn right."
By clandestine destiny or is it by a maleficent chaos theory we wake up everyday and assume the roles of our very lives. Those lives that followed a very precarious series of events to bring us to the exact point we assume at this very moment.
There are so many things, thoughts, ideas, creedos, revelations, that fire through my mind like a gatlin gun at all moments bringing peace and an ancient anxietal terror sporadically in every shot. When my mind had scurried away from logic I would center it with the old zen master saying that, "it is the mind itself, that leads the mind astray, of the mind, do not be mindless." Don't be mindless of the machine gun in our minds unloading the occasional regret, without those regrets who would we be?
Then there is love, we find ourselves frequenting in it's precense more and more as we creep on 30, either just playing the game to bide the time or taking the straight and narrow like most to find the suitable life partner and then nailing that shit down like a hurricane is coming.
But, for me it has been one shot in the head where the bullet lingers and the idea burns in more and more, an experience to meet someone special and to do something right.
About 5 months ago I embarked on an adventure with my pops shortly after I was laid off from my job, a time to reflect on a fuckered situation. Due to some heavy doses of antibiotics at the time I was not in the perfunctory manner to address the onslaught of epiphanies to come. Some of you have heard this story, but the only reason I keep telling it is because I can't get it out of my head.
It was set as a simple 5 day trip, heading to NY to see my great aunt who served as a missionary nun in Taiwan for almost 70 years, then were heading down to philly to check out their exceptional art catalogue, and then lastly we hit Gettysburg, the appex of Civil War insanities.
The initial meeting with my Great Aunt, whose name is Sister Paulita of the Maryknoll nuns, was a humbling one. At 97 she can only be described as a tiny Yoda encompassing all his wisdom and nearly his size as she had shrunk all throughout the years. I knew of her great works in her mission, and I knew she had been thrown out of China, and then she built a great support network in Taiwan. But what I didn't know was before she was extricated the chinese had starved and tortured her and she watched many of her friends drug town to town through the streets and systematically murdered as traitors of the evil west. By a miracle and nearly starved to death she finaly was allowed refuge in Taiwan. For anyone, this would have been a time to run, to call it a day, but she rose up, forgave her captors, accepted it as life and got to work in Tawain busy to start making some progress. She was the first nun to get it approved for all the rest of the nuns to get motorcycles so that they could bring aid to those in strife in a more expedient time. 60 years later she left Taiwan with full citizenship, and honor only given to six people a year and came back to the US as a legend. What to you say to someone who watches their friends executed and then without hesitance continues to help others, because what is a thanks really?
The next leg of the trip was to the Philly Museum of art, and there was a special show there, an artist whose work i had waitied a long time to see, Gorky. Gorky was a young somber fellow with a checkered past as a survivor. He outlasted the concentration camps of WWII and even then painted vigourously. They were running a retrospective on his work, 3 galleries, walls filled with Gorky and slow biography pits of his life strewn apart that read like a greek tradgedy. He made it out of the holocaust, brought up and orphan, and had oulasted several suicide attempts, until he finally made it to America where the early century NY landscape could not provide and eventually he took his own life. But what is most striking is his work, which I saw, three huge galleries packed full of his art, enough to embarass the work tenacity of artists twice his age. In his short 20 years of art it was evident his style changed maybe 20 times and his art making was his only constant, and then without so much as flick of a trigger he was gone.
The final trip was the most enlightening, Gettysburg. And I could go on and on about the horrors of Gettysburg, but it was only one simple field that I left with burned into my head, the Wheatfield. In this single field, smaller than a football field, 4000 men lay dead by the end of the battle, but the union could not relinquish it to the enemy, so the bodies kept piling, being sent in rank after rank. 4000 men, in a few hours, no older than us, dead for what certaintity in a small wheat field?
So dwelled on these events and searched for the meaning. The suffering was their connection, but how was it important? So I took time to break it down and re-analyze. The buddhists would say we are all born to suffer, which isn't necessarily untrue, but there has to be more to it. So I developed an outline to see these events in a seemingly ill fated positive light.
Life is suffering, but it is beautiful. At first we suffer and we feel pain, my aunt being tortured, Gorky's tormented life, the countless innocent dead at Gettysburg in just a simple small field. But then we gain perspective and begin to see suffering builds something;my aunt was saved by the taiwanese government, gorky worked tremendously almost possesed by his pain, the civil war soldiers fought to institute and protect what we still cherish today. It builds a foundation, and through perseverance something beautiful is constructed upon that very foundation. My aunt saved peoples lives, brought them aid, was a tiger and fought only for the people. Gorky created a lifetime of work, celebrated and carrying a heavy signifigance in his time of work setting a benchmark. Without those mens sacrifices in what state would we live today and how would that affect our lives now giving us the leisure to act like fools. Suffering, it is the greatest architect.
Rehashed, Life is suffering, but it is beautiful. At first we suffer and we feel pain, but then we gain perspective and begin to see suffering builds something. It builds a foundation, and through perseverance something beautiful is constructed upon that very foundation. It is the greatest architect.
So what relevance does this have to us, many of us the lost generation searching to find the answers, the synapse to our own lives? Times have changed, we live in a make it or break it America, so what of us? What of the dreamers? In this economy can those people expect to blossom or more than likely bust.
Raised by parents that made us far to aware of our own ineptitdues many of us have set out to be something more, something better than what we felt comfortable being, maybe some not.
Henry Ward Beecher once said, “If a man has come to that point where he is so content that he says; I do not want to know any more, or do any more or be any more, he is in a state of which he ought to be changed into a mummy." But I look at my friends and I don't see mummies, but rather a strange generation, the slacker generation as the media would call us, a generation on ADHD medicine and shitty sleep schedules.
For me, I wake up every morning with the same question, "what now?" And I don't know.Thirty is that number that defines you as a new category of no longer 20 somethings with caution to the wind, but now planners, movers, and shakers, a new group with all their eyes on the prize. It reminds me of a movie quote:
Doc Holliday: Wyatt, you ever wonder why we been a part of so many unfortunate incidents, yet we're still walking around? I have figured it out. It's nothing much, just luck. And you know why it's nothing much Wyatt? Because it doesn't matter much whether we are here today or not. I wake up every morning looking in the face of Death, and you know what? He ain't half bad. I think the secret old Mr. Death is holding is that it's better for some of us over on the other side. I know it can't be any worse for me. Maybe that's the place for your Maddie. For some people, this world ain't ever gonna be right.
Wyatt Earp: Is that supposed to let me off the hook?
Doc Holliday: There is no hook my friend. There's only what we do.
Which brings me back to my brief back and forth with Alan that maybe can put this thing to bed, maybe not, but here it is.
"it's a strange world we live in Mr. P.
"nothing we can't handle."
"damn right."
And I guess I look back at all the queer strangeness surrounding all our lives, the hurdles, and maybe within the way our generation has risen, it is nothing we can't handle. damn right.
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