Moving Mema, Pt II

“Be glad that you don’t have instant manifestation. This buffer of time is really your friend. It’s your opportunity to observe and to ponder and to visualize, and to remember. It’s your opportunity to take an emotional journey that might be different from what you’re actually observing.”
-Abraham Hicks

Onwards.  So even I, who prides myself on a materialistically un-accumulated lifestyle (again, for a USAer), have more than I need, and sometimes more than I want.  My grandma, on the other hand, has WAY more than she needs, and she still wants most of it.  As a close second to sentimental attachment, we often align ourselves with our possessions because they symbolize opportunity.  In the case of Mema’s hundreds of magazines, she was loathe to throw any away individually, because as soon as she picked it up to assess it’s worth, she saw an article she’d still like to read.  And seriously, who can’t relate to that?  Why can’t you get rid of that cookbook you never opened, huh?  The guitar gathering dust in the corner?  That email sitting in your inbox you just can’t seem to find time to respond to?  Why are relationships so hard to end?

I submit it is because we’re afraid of a future devoid of our past.  And in this way, we can see that attachment to opportunity is actually a related species of sentimentalism. The difference being that traditional sentimentalism is the desire for something lost from the past, attachment to opportunity being a desire for something lost from the future.  Nostalgia for a thing that hasn’t even happened yet.  (And did you catch how closely desire and fear are related?)  Especially difficult to cut loose are the things we’ve invested in.  Things we were good at.  Things we wanted to define us.    Don’t be ashamed!  It’s totally normal!  Do you have any idea how many different “Beginner’s Guide to ____” I have crowding my bookshelves?!  The amount of vegetation I’ve brought home, committed to learning how to pickle?!  I own a tambourine, for gods’ sake!  A tambourine!!!

So much about participating in humanity—creating art, loving and losing, disappointment, fatigue, resilience—is at it’s core this:  hope.  It’s a helluva thing.  And I’m not about to sit here and knock it.  But you need to investigate; you need to be discerning.  Because cheery, heart-warming hope can also manifest as self-delusion, manipulation at the hands of others, a lifetime of resentment for reality outside your control.  You must see it for what it is.  Understand first and foremost that the experience of hope is ingrained, it is part of your hardware, you cannot get rid of it.  It can be used as a tool to help you become better, it can help you find strength when you need it, can imbue you with nothing short of super-human abilities. It can.  But that doesn’t mean the path it leads down is straight and narrow if you stop paying attention.  It can also be used as a tool for excuses, and it willdistort your experience of reality.  It will distort even your memories.  Hope will invariably serve your interests (notice I didn’t specify “best”), so keep a close eye on what you’re getting interested in, and if/when you find your interests unaligned from what you know from experience, shut that shit down.  The confrontation and usage of hope will be different for everybody.  With this in mind, remain not only knowledgeable and vigilant, but also an active participant.  You must give to your dreams as much as you wish to receive- you’re the captain of the hope boat.  Hope alone?  Phhhththththp.

But getting back to our primal fear of losing (or rather, the desire not to lose)—this tension between who we are, were, and want to be—I believe that this is the result of a common misunderstanding of the relationship between past, present, and future.  You are the person you were.  Allllll of that was you, is you.  And you are the person you’re going to be, whether it’s the person who kept with that thing or the person that gave that thing up.  You might be the person who made that big decision and changed your life and you’re happy with it.  That’s great!  You might be that person who made that big decision and changed your life and you’re unhappy with it.  That sucks!  Well, now’s your chance to make another decision that will change all that, OR now’s the time to decide not make that decision and keep on not making that decision and be that person who continues on in regret.  Or not!  Nothing is promised, and that’s a hard pill to swallow.  Also, external circumstances are largely outside of your control.  Whomp, whomp.  But none of it—past, present, and future—is isolated, and in that way at least on the bright side, nothing is lost.  It’s all just part of what makes you you.

But it’s still hard.  I get it.  Grandma’s lived in that house for something like 50 years.  I haven’t even lived for 50 years.  I cannot imagine what she’s going through.  She has worked hard to build a dusty, inanimate, and wholly impractical army…which is beyond monetary value to her.  She is connected to everything represented there, every chair, every lamp, every piece of fake fruit (SO MUCH FAKE FRUIT).  But now every bit as much as she is the woman with the story of how each item came into her possession and what she wanted to do with it, she is the woman who must make the decision of what stays and what goes.  She is a woman who’s being forced to confront, very abruptly, where hope led, for better or worse.  She is a woman who’s current mindset is that the past can only be kept present through keeping things and the future must be reachable by keeping these things as well. And there’s an insidious truth hidden in there, but that reasoning is fundamentally and disastrously flawed.  The past has already stopped existing.  You cannot keep it.  And the future will never arrive, it’s just a past waiting to happen.  And yet, here they both are at once, shaping the present moment.

I read somewhere the idea that time isn’t real, there’s only the “endless present”.  Now, if you wanna get real deep into this stuff: once you’ve accepted timelessness, (or at least the conditionality of the past upon the present and the present upon the future), even the idea of “present” becomes a grey area, highly suspect.  And once you’ve accepted that, well, you are really close to being able to throw away those magazines.  Resistance to impermanence, taking a last stand against change—that is a battle you are going to lose.  Accepting impermanence, maintaining a practice of equanimity towards it, and stripping the nostalgia from what was “yours” all along, well…there’s always hope.