Winter’s Last Dream
Depending on your outlook in life, the Roman stoic philosopher Epictetus was either a brilliant man whose wisdom is timeless, or a complete buzzkill with antiquated ideas at best. I like to speculate he would be tickled more with the latter’s assessment.
One of his more famous philosophies is that the enemy of happiness turns out to be the yearning for what is out of our control. In America, yearning for what we don’t have, is a foundation block of a capitalist economy. Whether it’s a basic staple, like food or housing, or something ridiculous like a fancy sports car or a battery-powered singing fish on the shelf at Walmart; we are all consumers seeking something. It’s a human trait. And our environment is all too happy to provide us with options to fill this yearning, as long as we have the money for it.
Bottom line: it’s hard to appreciate what you have when every sound and sight within our environment tell us we should never be satisfied. Today’s algorithms, screens, and streams, fill every space it can find to fuel emotion and desire, whether we wanted to go there or not. These are the meandering thoughts I try to push aside while trying to organize a cluttered closet on a late Winter afternoon.
The outside has been dull and gray lately, setting a backdrop of uncertainty. A foggy fuzziness of walking towards a destination unseen. There is no true guide for forward, backward or sideways. You can stay rooted in this space for a little while. But you are not meant to.
Because inside there is a restlessness. An itching for something to change, or a need for change, or a sense that one needs to change. Yes, there’s chores, snacks, shopping, Netflix and other distractions, but the need for an unknown shift, loops in the background. Droning through gray days, thoughts, and conversations. It’s irritating when you are not sure where or what you are supposed to do. But you sense change is in the air.
The universe is nudging you to make space. So we undertake the difficult practice of patience for what needs time to be revealed.
But this is easier said than done in modern times. The ability to make space in life to catch our breath, reflect, or just be, is becoming a rare commodity. Days are stacked with to-dos, “woulds”, “shoulds,” and “coulds.” These thoughts clutter the mind like an untuned radio skipping from station to station. The mind’s constant chatter joining in the chorus of our noisy environments; fueling restlessness and assuring us that we can find what we’re looking for in the screen, in a product, a political cause, or a t-shirt, rather than in the mirror. It’s hard to strip down to just you and spend time in a raw, unhindered state.
Old CD’s (compact disc for the young ones) fall from the closet shelf. As I sort, Disposable Heroes of the Hypocrisy surfaces and I remember their song “Television.” Its message and cutting commentary on the “drug of the nation” remains relevant today, some 30-plus years from its recording. John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy emerges. For fun, I queue up “Watching the Wheels.”
Old memories of junior high and vinyl floats out, a nostalgia comfortably softened by time. Perhaps this feeling of a crazy world is not new, just a different time with different actors. Times have changed, but our feelings remain timelessly human. And this becomes the hope, and a foundation for happiness. An understanding to let the heart sit in this space, on its own…hopes and scars unveiled. Letting the heart squirm with these restless feelings and let it heal, from, and for me. I don’t know what that means yet, but as John Lennon says “I just have to let it go.”
Epictetus was right. So was Lennon. We move towards a forward. To our next chapter we go.
