WAS IT ENOUGH?

WAS IT ENOUGH?

Lately, as I seem to age at the rate of the average blinking eye, I find myself thinking “Was it enough?” instead of “Is it enough?”  

One of the biggest challenges of being middle-aged is that you suddenly find yourself, like an ancient, grizzled, guitar-plucking bluesman, standing at the crossroads intersection of your own personal Bayou, where you can go in one of two directions: backward or forwards.

The past most taken, is paved with the sweet and pliable-as-the-airborne-wisps-of-pink-cotton candy.  It is both infinite and swathed, creating a safe passage journey back to a most precious and private universe where the spirited infusion of dreams roam like delicate dinosaurs, who were, of course, the first to go.  But once upon a time they roared.

The past is where our long lost parents are waiting in the parking lot of infinity to pick us up and drive us home.  

The past is where they are still filled with generous billows of breath, inestimable vitality and unconditional love.  It’s where we can lay down our heads on the feathery, goose down pillows of memory and float sleep deep within the serpentine rivers of our bottomless sorrow or fly, like the just-released logic free doves of unfettered joy. 

The past is where the most significant moments of life are perfectly organized with military precision, in order of what hurt most.

The future, the other crossroads choice, is where we find ourselves, despite resistance and plastic surgery,  hurtling like a comet towards the reptilian grip of the vast unknown which turns us all into a civilization of back-seat, belted-in children who chant in unison and feral despair, Are we there yet?”

Thankfully we are evolutionarily wired for survival and are, for the most part, Gorillas in the optimist by nature.  

We rally.  We stagger to our feet like Rocky, round ten.

We move on.  

We tend not to linger at the scene of our own head-on collisions, though we reserve the right to revisit them in order to re-excavate whatever life lessons we need to dredge up.

But here, in this current Twilight Zone zip code where I find myself living, I have discovered that I am not able to discriminate between those two questions:  “Was it enough?”   And, “Is it enough?”

For now, the answer to both of them is: I don’t know.    

There are so many factors that influence our way of thinking.  

We are always, looking upwards to the sky, like ignored flood victims, desperately in search of our fathers and mothers, especially in places our chose houses of worship and in the higher places of government.   

We did begin with founding fathers after all.  And Thoreau was all about Mother Nature.

Up until now, our presidents were our role models and standard bearers of excellence.  

But in the last election we suddenly found ourselves to be the children of divorce who had to choose if we wanted to live with Mom or Dad, and despite the fact that dad was a deadbeat, absentee father, a staggeringly greedy, petty thief, who was also inappropriate, untalented and as narcissistic as your average affluenza stricken five-year-old, most of our sisters and brothers choose to live with him.

And as a result we, who really wanted to live with mom, have been forced, like the protagonist of any good Dickens novel, to live a life that in less than two years has felt like a decades-old Black Plague.

You see, by nature and nurture, we crave direction and true leadership. 

We are all forever children who are forever juggling the day to day, hour by hour gas-powered chainsaws of life and we just can’t do it all.

We are all like overwhelmed stay-at-home parents whose job demands would make a Navy Seal wail like Martin Shkreli at his sentencing.

Try as we may go as adults for Halloween, underneath our costumes and masks, we desperately want to be taken care of and lead by flashlight by caretakers who are savvy and who can correct their course by the navigational true north powers of their own, perceptive instincts.

Try as we may to make a contented life out of our own, isolated, island-in-the-stream-of-the-internet-stream existence, we cannot do it alone.  

We need parcels of freshly delivered love.  Support.  Kindness.  Compassion.  

We need to greet each other like big, tail-wagging, dopey dogs instead of circling each other like a pack of rabid wolves.  Or Foxes.  The kind that delivers hate-spewing, divisive, fake news for fun and profit, while the anchors laugh all the way to the bank and behind your back.

What we cannot do, must not do, is look for our everything answers in either our already committed mates or in the potential of strangers who suddenly appear on the never-ending carousel of Match. Com which is fueled by the fumes of contaminated fantasy, high-levels of deception and our own, deep craving to be airlifted to safety.

Instead, I suggest a far more aggressive life-saving procedure.

You have to discover your own, most expressive form of art in order to discover the true power and measure the true sustainability of your own heart.

You need to find your own unique, creative, non-threatening individualized way of saying, “I’m hurt.”   “I’m angry.”   “I love you.”  “I need.”  “I want.”  

Babies cry, they get tended to, life goes on.  And that is based on pure trust.  They recognize our scent.  Our sound.  Our the distant jungle rhythm of our heartbeat. 

That is enough to get them through the day...but sadly, for awhile, not the night.,

In this for-now night place of perpetual, unswathed bewilderment where I find myself living of late, where it now seems apparent that the Godot of our choice is just going to keep us waiting until at least November, we have no choice but to find our own moveable feast, whose secret sauce ingredients include a nectar of innocence, purity, optimism and most importantly faith.

And laughter.   This is why God let Jerry Lewis live so long.

Oh. And dance too.  This is why God made Balanchine and West Side Story.

And music.  That is why God gave us The Beatles,  Rogers and Hammerstein, our inability to stop our feet from tapping at a concert or to unconsciously sing a duet with the piped in music in the aisles of CVS.

And art.  This is why God whispered to Van Gough and made water lilies that he thought would delight Monet.

As a writer whose primary goal has mostly been to make you laugh, through the many shows I worked on.  I have this to share.

The first time that I ever heard my son Max laugh, was while he was installed on my baby carrier back, I was standing in the Museum of Modern Art, staring at a Jasper John flag and he suddenly screamed with laughter.

To this day I have no idea what he thought was so funny.  What tickled him.

But does it matter?

Something prompted him to suddenly explode like a cannon burst of clown confetti and howl with joy.

Maybe little ones can simply hear octaves or see dimensions that we can’t...or have long forgotten how to find.

But there is hope for all of us.

Because they are still out there.

Waiting.