As I've grown older, I've become more emotional.
I used to be a self-contained person, trusting my experiences and my knowledge and my ideas of how things worked. I was a stoic to the utmost, accepting anything that happened with patience and trust, denying emotion as a waste of energy. I used to be unshakeable. Movies could not make me sad, otherwise sensitive discussions saw me completely put together, an old photograph would never stir my heart.
But over the past few years, really since I learned to open up to people, and since my life experience has grown with exposure to greater diversity, and because of my propensity towards empathy and sympathy, and since I've started to realize what a precious and fragile thing life is, I've become significantly more emotional. I don't run around crying over things, but I feel emotions well up in me. For example, one of the saddest days in my life was when I realized my parents can and will die. I consider myself very fortunate to have the relationship I do with my parents, and we've had our rough patches, but as I've looked around me, I've watched peers start losing their parents. My parents have developed chronic pains and aches, visits to the doctor are more frequent and less routine, strange symptoms start surfacing. And I've just started being very thankful for the meals we have together and generally hanging out with them. And when somebody else loses a parent, I feel sick and scared and sad, because I know it could just as easily have been me.
There was a certain arrogance and recklessness to my youth (not in the obnoxious way, I hope), I just couldn't conceive of limits and humanity. Everything was a logic game, an issue of finding the right answer, of playing for keeps. Somewhere along the way, I learned there is a beauty in humanity and a value to understanding it in even the most basic way. There's a lot more meaning in the pedestrian things we do, and in the things we took for granted and in the extraordinary moments as well. Which opened my eyes to the frailty of it all. Our minds are limited by our experiences and our imaginations. Momento mori is an understatement--Imagine Death is much more to the point. Imagine what you've done with your life, and how the world will continue without you. Imagine where you wish you'd left your mark. Imagine if you would have regrets. Imagine the passing of others and how that would impact you or how you would treat them differently if you knew their time was running out. The saying "live every day as if it's your last" is filled with urgency and is usually applied to epicurian and hedonistic philosophies. I'm going to throw something else out there for you to ponder "live every day as if it's everyone else's last". Would you pick a fight with someone on his/her deathbed? Would you deny him/her a parting wish? Would you only do something for him/her if it were convenient? Would you bear that grudge? It's a different perspective.
My next door neighbor of 18 years passed away earlier this week. I don't think I'll ever get used to death. I never know what to say to someone who's lost someone. I guess one's presence and the action of showing up is one of the greatest things you can do. My neighbor had lived to a ripe old age. He had been suffering the after-effects of a stroke so it wasn't totally unexpected. I hadn't spoken to him in a couple of years because he and his wife had moved to Pittsburgh to be close to one of their kids and because there was a great assisted-living community there. So yesterday, as I sat in the funeral home looking at him, I thought about my grandfathers, my second cousins, a friend of mine, and the whole slew of wakes and funerals I've been to and the people who they were for. And what can you bring, but the memories? He loved to work in his garden, fix up his house, he was thankful when we'd shovel his walkways, he'd come over for all our parties, he sent cards when we graduated high school/college/etc/, he was proud of us. But one of my lasting memories was when we'd just moved into the house, my brother and I were playing outside and we were running around on our lawn and then we started running around on his--suddenly he appeared and chased us off his lawn (I think he'd just put down seed or something). For the next couple of months we'd tip-toe around his lawn whenever the soccer ball or baseball went onto his lawn and find a point of entry that was most direct and then take as few steps on his lawn as possible, as if we might get electrocuted if we set off sensors by staying too long. Then one day my brother and I were throwing around a baseball and he was outside. The baseball tipped off the top of my glove and skittered onto his lawn. I looked at my brother, looked at the ball and looked at my neighbor. I must have looked like I was about to cry--I was 5 and absolutely terrified of the ogre next door, until he walked over, picked up the ball, held it out to me and smiled as I took it from him and politely whispered "thank you." From then on, we were totally cool. And for the half hour I sat there, talked to his kids and whispered a few prayers for his peaceful repose, all I could think was that we were cool and would forever be.
I used to be a self-contained person, trusting my experiences and my knowledge and my ideas of how things worked. I was a stoic to the utmost, accepting anything that happened with patience and trust, denying emotion as a waste of energy. I used to be unshakeable. Movies could not make me sad, otherwise sensitive discussions saw me completely put together, an old photograph would never stir my heart.
But over the past few years, really since I learned to open up to people, and since my life experience has grown with exposure to greater diversity, and because of my propensity towards empathy and sympathy, and since I've started to realize what a precious and fragile thing life is, I've become significantly more emotional. I don't run around crying over things, but I feel emotions well up in me. For example, one of the saddest days in my life was when I realized my parents can and will die. I consider myself very fortunate to have the relationship I do with my parents, and we've had our rough patches, but as I've looked around me, I've watched peers start losing their parents. My parents have developed chronic pains and aches, visits to the doctor are more frequent and less routine, strange symptoms start surfacing. And I've just started being very thankful for the meals we have together and generally hanging out with them. And when somebody else loses a parent, I feel sick and scared and sad, because I know it could just as easily have been me.
There was a certain arrogance and recklessness to my youth (not in the obnoxious way, I hope), I just couldn't conceive of limits and humanity. Everything was a logic game, an issue of finding the right answer, of playing for keeps. Somewhere along the way, I learned there is a beauty in humanity and a value to understanding it in even the most basic way. There's a lot more meaning in the pedestrian things we do, and in the things we took for granted and in the extraordinary moments as well. Which opened my eyes to the frailty of it all. Our minds are limited by our experiences and our imaginations. Momento mori is an understatement--Imagine Death is much more to the point. Imagine what you've done with your life, and how the world will continue without you. Imagine where you wish you'd left your mark. Imagine if you would have regrets. Imagine the passing of others and how that would impact you or how you would treat them differently if you knew their time was running out. The saying "live every day as if it's your last" is filled with urgency and is usually applied to epicurian and hedonistic philosophies. I'm going to throw something else out there for you to ponder "live every day as if it's everyone else's last". Would you pick a fight with someone on his/her deathbed? Would you deny him/her a parting wish? Would you only do something for him/her if it were convenient? Would you bear that grudge? It's a different perspective.
My next door neighbor of 18 years passed away earlier this week. I don't think I'll ever get used to death. I never know what to say to someone who's lost someone. I guess one's presence and the action of showing up is one of the greatest things you can do. My neighbor had lived to a ripe old age. He had been suffering the after-effects of a stroke so it wasn't totally unexpected. I hadn't spoken to him in a couple of years because he and his wife had moved to Pittsburgh to be close to one of their kids and because there was a great assisted-living community there. So yesterday, as I sat in the funeral home looking at him, I thought about my grandfathers, my second cousins, a friend of mine, and the whole slew of wakes and funerals I've been to and the people who they were for. And what can you bring, but the memories? He loved to work in his garden, fix up his house, he was thankful when we'd shovel his walkways, he'd come over for all our parties, he sent cards when we graduated high school/college/etc/, he was proud of us. But one of my lasting memories was when we'd just moved into the house, my brother and I were playing outside and we were running around on our lawn and then we started running around on his--suddenly he appeared and chased us off his lawn (I think he'd just put down seed or something). For the next couple of months we'd tip-toe around his lawn whenever the soccer ball or baseball went onto his lawn and find a point of entry that was most direct and then take as few steps on his lawn as possible, as if we might get electrocuted if we set off sensors by staying too long. Then one day my brother and I were throwing around a baseball and he was outside. The baseball tipped off the top of my glove and skittered onto his lawn. I looked at my brother, looked at the ball and looked at my neighbor. I must have looked like I was about to cry--I was 5 and absolutely terrified of the ogre next door, until he walked over, picked up the ball, held it out to me and smiled as I took it from him and politely whispered "thank you." From then on, we were totally cool. And for the half hour I sat there, talked to his kids and whispered a few prayers for his peaceful repose, all I could think was that we were cool and would forever be.
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