Lughnasa College Moon
Understanding of more than the motives of the moment seem more and more elusive as the third phase of life wraps itself around me. The deep reasons for liking, say, the classics and dogs and reading are lost in the fog of memory darkened by time into near opacity. There was a time when understanding felt more accessible, more relevant, perhaps as a lever with which to change personality, to affect a less tangled future.
Now though the past, my own past, not that long a time by historical reckoning and none at all in the sweep of geological time, not only seems to recede faster than the clock’s ticking, but happily so. It’s as if the meaning of the past, my intimate past that is, has begun to detach itself from my present, floating off like Sandra Bullock in Gravity, untethered and weightless.
This sounds pathological, but it feels blessed. This man that I am now is just who he is, not explainable by his past nor excused by it, but who he is either in spite of it or to the side of the past. Perhaps it is always like this: that the person we are now seems only distantly related to the person we were ten years ago, forty years ago, even an hour ago. That untethered feeling comes with a sense of liberation, of not being bound to the threads, the strings, the ropes, the cable of yesterday; not being bound and free to go where today goes, not captive to yesterday.
Oh, this is not to say that the past does not still have its effects. Of course it does. Just that they are no longer determinative, destiny creating. They are, after all, in the past.
