Variations of a Life
Reflection
A
Prelude
It's an odd thing to grow old and reflect back upon your life's journey and what it made you. Old, well no, not so much old, but instead rather maybe aged. I've aged. I have aged and now, with too much time on my hands I just seem to sit and think. I sit and think about how I became the man I am and how I failed to become the man I probably should have. So, I sit and try to put into some twisted perspective all of the variables that acted upon me to render me into the sum of my life's equation.
It came to me, this idea, or rather this memory of a life equation, in a dream I had some weeks ago, while dozing beneath a large Weeping Willow tree anchored into the bank along the sparkling, mountain spring fed river that winds and wends its way through my land. My land, that statement too is one that I find to be quite out of the context of my life, because for nearly all of that life I considered very few things to truly be mine, least of all my 'life'. But, this dream memory was one which recalled a time, long ago, when a friend's child surmised that we were all like the numbers of the set of Real numbers. She explained to me in a voice far too firm and sure for a child of her age, that we were simply members of the set human and therefore, she proposed and quite frighteningly did a fine job of explaining, that just like the variables and functions, which act upon the set of Real numbers changing their value; our lives too were subject to the variables and functions which we encountered. Heady thoughts for a twelve year old, but the memory of that conversation, while dozing blissfully with nothing else besides the burbling of my river and the comforting snuffling of my ground reigned horse got me thinking. I was just as she'd described, that and we are all like books. We are books bound in the thread of our experiences and sorted into volumes. These life volumes hold the proofs defining the equation of our life.
I came away from that dream with a burning nearly debilitating need to un-tangle my lost life. I came away from that moment with the profound sense that if I reflected, long enough and with enough purity of soul, upon the proofs defining the sum that I had become, I might finally find the peace I'd sought out for all of my lost life. So, I will write it all out. Every painful, grievous, angry, terror filled morsel of it. There may be a bit of joy and laughter too but… I will set the variables into matrices and write out formulas to interpret how they acted upon me. If nothing else, I'd prove to myself that I am a man wrought not by personal desire or the ache of bitter regret, but instead a man who had simply been too weak to act in his own defense, a man who'd allowed life's often grim functions and variables to shape him, instead of taking the formula into his own control. I will prove that, for me, the only solution to the equation of my life was to insure the happiness of the people I'd so freely and completely given my heart and soul to. If I can do that…I can leave this miserable life believing that I served a finer purpose than living for myself alone and maybe God might even see my words and forgive me all of my failings. I think that some lost and childish part of me would like that, needs that absolution.
Salem: March 8 2015