Out the other side?

 

Saturday, September 21, 2013

 

I wake to the sharp chirp of my backyard cardinal and the soft hushed hum of tires on the highway I can just barely see over the top of the motel parking lot.

This is not the end of the world as we know it, just another day passing, and a Saturday in which I anticipate doing my usual daily chores.

But restlessness stirs in the trees between me and the highway, and a final sense of change that perhaps I can attribute to the passing of summer into fall.

This is always a tough time of year, hinting of altered states over which we no longer have control.

Freud and Jung give us glimpses of doom, one telling us that our lives are fixed by experiences that we have no way to recall except in knee-jerk of suppressed memory, while the other prepares us for the ultimate change when our consciousness fades back into the collective people of faith call God, and snake oil sales people sell us ascension robes to greet.

I always knew that two kinds of people existed, those who have the ability to change their destiny, break old habits, and become something new and grand even when the Freudian past has left them with painful suppression that would make the Grand Canyon seem small.

I have met only a handful of such success stories, and even they only succeed to a degree.

Most as greater minds pointed out live lives of quiet desperation, unaware of the terrible patterns of life that drive them from cycle to cycle without change.

But as time has taught me, these are the lucky ones, the people who can go on without thought, acting and reacting, but never with the anticipation of doom or change.

A third kind of person has emerged – the acutely aware person, who perhaps understands that it is almost impossible to bring about change, and must live life trapped inside an existence like a helpless passenger in a run away car, knowing doom will come, watching each cycle come and go with the same result, unable to do anything to stop it from happening.

These are the people who suffer most, and who I also tend to admire most, those whose talents are so great as to have the ability to overcome anything, but for some reason, cannot get that car into gear.

They flirt with change, and sometimes, they pretend they have changed, but it always the same rise and fall, like an old gangster movie, a sad hero, whose abilities cannot disrupt the basic primitive passions that drives him to the height of criminal glory, and to his demise.

My father was one of these, I have recently learned, and so are many of the people I most deeply loved in my life, perhaps because I have come to know the person inside, behind all the masks and bullshit, feeling less sorrowful for them, than respect for their courage, even when I know what they sometimes do to survive, violates all that I have come to believe.

I keep wanting to trust in love, needing to believe more deeply in the people inside, and I have always and always will hold out hope that they can overcome the worst of Freud and Jung, and come out at the other end – if not completely changed, then changed enough to no longer feel trapped in their own lives.