DISLOCATION
Last night I began to realize that Stephen Jenkinson‘s way of provoking me was what brought the subject to life, but that my response to his confident assertions is in turn colored completely by my own perspective and that in responding to him I am doing the same thing he was doing with Kimberley, I am shifting the conversation, or rather my one sided response, to something that I have been puzzling about for a long time and have come to a conclusion about and probably describe in my own terms, talking to myself and not anyone else.
One of his answers to a question about the future was to ask us in imagination to take off our shoes and wade into the river with a name like Bon Homme (I forget the actual name), a name loaded with meaning, that runs past his farm in Canada. You wade in and look down stream which represents the future and upstream which represents the past while where you stand is the present.
At this point I got lost, but the point, I think, that Stephen was making was that the future isn‘t here yet. We know the past and we are aware of the present, but we really have no idea what the future will be, we can only imagine the future. So it is a waste of time to ignore the past and live in the future, or at least I think that was his point.
Or maybe that is my point and I am turning his statement into my point and wondering about the future in my own way. I am 85 and almost everything significant in my life is in the past. But this also enriches the present because all that I have experienced in life comes to bear on the present. At 85 I have only a few years left, at the very unlikely most, I have 15 years left and even that seems very little because when I look back 15 years it seems almost like yesterday. But then I remember that Stephen has pointed out that the future doesn‘t exist and never will except in imagination. At the most, the future will remain a possibility, not a fact, to which I will bring all my experience to help me to feel my way through whatever the future will bring. And the process of feeling along will be fun because it will be in the present. And this means that I can forget about the short time I have left, which I know nothing about, and can focus on being fully alive in the present as I feel my way along with the rich experience of the past helping me along. It is with great relief that all I have to concentrate on is being fully alive in the present and simply forget about the future which will never happen except in the present. When I do face death in the present I can fully embrace it and accept it without worrying about the future (after my death) which will never happen anyway.
This is what I felt my way to after being dislocated by Stephen‘s future in the river metaphor. It probably has little to do with the point that Stephen was making. This is what suddenly makes sense to me.
I can even shorten this awareness to say that I am made must alive by realizing that I am among the living dead, those people who are still alive but only for the flicker of an eyelash in over all time, but will for the rest of existence be dead. This makes me the living dead.
And then if I would go one step further and give a little lecture on the living dead and tell everyone in the audience that they are the living dead without explaining myself they would be just as confused as I am by Stephen‘s statements about ceremony. They would look at each other and wink because they are obviously living and not dead. But if I said it with absolute assurance and they had paid $27.16 to listen to me they might still buy my book at the end of the lecture.
So that is one thing that Stephen made me think about and it seems very profound to me. But instead of taking my word for it, you are going to have to figure this out for yourself, which may be what Stephen Jenkinson in his provocative way was trying to do in the first place, make me think for myself. It also means that I have gotten you just as confused about what I am trying to say as Stephen Jenkinson confused me last night. But you‘ve saved $27.16 and I have no book to sell you.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 