We spend our whole lives dying. Even as the cells divide and clump in utero--because they are cells and cells age--little engines of entropy rev and slide into sneaky gear. Our timelines unravel even as our cares knit our brows into the sweetly idiosycratic skin maps that we call faces. Facing this--our limited time--is a puzzle.. Brilliant minds like Stephen Hawking explain patiently that time does not exist the way we experience it--like a story with a beginning middle and end but instead is more like a body of water or a fabric comprised of space and particles and light that can be draped and folded--tacked into unlikely shapes by the heavy staples of black holes.
We--mammalian bundles of arcing and sparking neurons and corpuscles--seem oriented somehow to beginnings middles and ends. Is it the diurnal journey thing? That we wake with the sun we move through a day, and we then close it with a brief spell of dreaming and unconsciousness couched in a velvet blanket of night? This is a common explanation for our story fixation.Or is it the neuronal journey sparked here, traverses a course and landing there.
The lifespan is proposeed as the template for storying, too--the weird morphing from infant--tenderskinned and brimming with potential--to elder--thin-skinned, fading from ripe to wizened concentrate. But it's a ruse. A puppet show put on by itinerant mummers taking advantage or our yearning ganglionic impulses to see ourselves made sense of.
The story line is a lullaby we croon throughout our days to offer handholds in the gravity-less freefall of a non-omniscient, non-story-line reality.
And like those players on the stage, we can all fall down or draw satisfied applause. And it is is just a play. A story within a story that is not a story. Once upon a time. Time once upon a. A time upon once. Upon once a time. See how easy it is to try and grammar out a meaning where there really is none?
There is an exercise where a sentence is placed on a page, the words just the first and last letters with a few salient once in between. One can read these sentences with surprising alacrity. Apparently, we will find the sense in nonsense, sniffing out clues to piece together the word, the sentence the meaning.
Yet I like to remember that our original organizing principles are faces, the timbre of family voices and the smell of mother's milk. These are what babies notice and know. These are the original code key and they are not stories. The dots are connected only this far: Eyes go with mouth goes with nose. That smell is Her and She is Yum. Those voices are yes, holding, here. They are moments. They are enfoldments. They wrap the infant into "yes, okay." And that is the whole story. Yes. Okay. The ganglia fire up ever so briefly simply to say....
Okay. Yes.
