End of an Era

I am always put out of sorts when I miss a call on my cell phone. I will enter a room to find my expectant cellphone cheerfully and alarmingly informing me that I have missed a call, yet due to my technological ineptitude there is no call display to show me who had been so sorely disappointed to have missed me. Their identity is usually forever lost to me. Perhaps I am disturbed because I am entirely insecure and neurotic and am therefore emotionally devastated by the loss of a possible social excursion, or even a conversation with another human being. Yet, that indeed is it, it is the conversation! That chance communication with another being, lost by my absent mind-edness, that hope of connection with another being, that joke of a detatched engagement over a telephone signal. That missed call did not only represent a possible vacuous social enagement, but the possibility of one of those golden moments, one of those times that a friend needed to talk, and for some reason you dropped everything and went for a walk, went for a walk and talked, and together approached something which might actually be called a real experience of life.

Today as I was driving down the road in the early evening my eye caught the streetlights as they flickered on. In that split second I realised that I had just missed the flash of the dusk. I had missed that moment at which some city planners deemed the natural light to be at such a level that streetlights were necessary and that night should begin. During that flash, during that minute instance of dusk, I may have seen it, experienced it, but by the time the light had travelled to my eyes and I was able to process the stimuli in my mind it was gone. I've said it before, the dusk is something that cannot be seen nor comprehended easily. Yet, there is no point in writing, or even thinking about nostalgia because it will always come back to haunt you.

This theme of missed opportunities has been continually recurring in my mind today and for the majority of my life. A rather spontaneous friend of mine recently convinced me to move to Tofino where he has been living this summer, something I should have done 2 months ago. Instead I have been sitting around my suburb wishing that I was somewhere else, somewhere other than the blase tedium of the suburbs. I live too much in regret. I feel as if life has not yet begun because I am perpetually looking back. That is what I do, I am an historian, more to the point I am a human being, whose very existence is dependent upon the capacity to reflect and interpret the past. It is often said that he who forgets his past is doomed to repeat it, yet I have begun to see recently that the inverse is also true. The reason for looking back to the past is to learn how to forget that which we are looking at, let it recede into phantasmatic oblivion and allow oneself to drift on, unimpeded into the blazing glory of the infinite nonexistent yet eternal futures.

What was it about a missed cellphone call that made me think of this, to put together four thoughts from throughout today that I had thought I had forgotten. Irony indeed! Again, it is the possibilities incurred by the enigmatic caller. It makes me ponder what inumerable paths my life could have taken and could still take, what conversations I could have had, had and could have, people I could meet, faces that I might someday vaguely and hauntingly recognise. I will quote an introspective friend of mine to end my thoughts, "we don't know where we are, but we know HOW to get out of here." I don't know where I am going in this life, or even where I am, but I am confident that I know how to deal with that. Rather than fabricate a roadmap or religion, a purpose or a reason for any of this divine siezure that we call existence I possess the capacity to actually embrace all of it, the good and the bad, the dark and the light, the depressed and the manic... I have no need for trite answers or solutions, or even sight to see where it is that I am going, I just need to go...