THE RESURRECTION OF YOU

Lately, I have felt like the most recent days of my life are going by at the speed of those old, calendar page-flipping movie montages which turned decades into seconds.

It’s hard enough being a man, a toe-tapping creature who is bred to be goal oriented, impatient and always in a honk-honk from the driveway hurry.  I was even antsy writing that last sentence.  

And now I’m fretting about the next one.  

Are we there yet?

When I was young, time felt like it was made out of Silly Putty which could stretch for miles and turn virtually anything into a child’s game.  

Planet Earth  was the very same globe that Charlie Chaplin blissfully toyed with, in The Great Dictator.

Words like “someday” and “forever” made up 99.99% of my vocabulary. 

I dreamed from the holy valleys and mountain peaks of the still-forming heart with wide open eyes, often while staring at the vast duvet of stars and planets like the Little Prince that I was then, sitting perched, knees to chin, on the edge of an imaginary moon, as secret wishes ascended and exploded into a million pixels until I could hear clearly, the throbbing, instructive and most exquisite musical tones of the universe which surely Shakespeare must have heard when he created his midsummer night love-struck fairies.

Life briefly allows you the illusion, especially when you are young,  the unbridled power to arrange and re-arrange your wildest and most ambitious goals like a sprig of fresh cut daisies into the curved body of a most welcoming vase.

Early on, the items are all very George Bailey. Graduate college.  Travel the world. Find a job.  Become successful.  Get married.  Buy a house.  Have children.  Grow old.  

What we never factored in was the reality that is the universe of the grown-up is every bit as unpredictable and temperamental as Scarlett O’Hara.

Just like that our great expectations are gone with the wind.

And it is all exhausting.

We only stop when it’s time to love and when it’s time to mourn. 

When either condition ends, we discover that healing does not happen overnight, if at all.  It’s a lovely concept, very fairy tale in its reverse Humpty Dumpty way.  The truths we never resurface looking or feeling the same as we did before and it doesn’t take long to figure out that Picasso got it right. We are just abstract pieces of jigsaw puzzles that do not always fit or create the picture of ourselves that we imagine.

Perfection is what you pray for.  

Life is what you settle with.

When you regain your composure and are ready to re-enter the conditions now stipulated by your new life, little by little you start to through all the Kubler Ross steps of dying until you finally accept all the dents, scratches and limited working pistons of your still working engine.

When you live in Los Angeles, as I did for way too many Hollywood minutes, we all had to live on the corner of Sunset and Fountain of Youth (*For the uninitiated, Fountain is a street in West Hollywood).  

The opioid of choice was fear, which was, for the most part, self-administered.

I was lucky and got to leave.  But that did not come with a small price.  I had to go through a complete nervous breakdown and rebuild myself over a period of years until I was able to allow my cells to breath again and grow at the proper rate.

And why was I able to do it?

Because I suddenly had time.   

Instead of time owning me, I owned time.  

By evacuating the City of Angels and returning home to my native New York, I was able to slowly create my own inner city of Angels whose thriving population loved me as much as I loved them.

Ultimately, I wiped out my past, clapped my life erasers together, and started anew and over the last decade, I learned how to write.   I mean really write.

I took on unimaginably frightening projects, beginning with the creation of an autobiographically, emotionally harrowing play, whose process has been a five-year boot camp in learning how to be  brutally honest with every single key tap and you keep doing it over and over and over again, until one day you wake up to discover that you have become completely transparent.

And there is simply no turning back.  

Just like that, I went from the Pacific to the Authentic without a lifeguard and  I continue to swim further and further out, way past the point of safety, every single day.

When you write like this, you are, on some level, flirting with the sometimes spiritous idea of drowning in your own sea of despair.

Impulsive thoughts can release the hounds.

But what choice do you have?   

You can always return, I suppose, to the shallow end of the kiddie pool and pretend that you are whatever age you were when you were convinced that you were precious and adored. 

Or you can stay mired in the primordial ooze and hope that one day you will walk upright and without opposable thumbs.

My late psychiatrist, Mike Gold, an elfin man of immense wisdom and sparkle, cast a net to me, as I slowly sank into the self-lacerating horizon of madness,  by telling me that depression is a crisis of faith and in order for the clouds to part you have to metaphorically die and fully mourn who you were in order to regain the right to re-enter your soul.

I had no idea what he meant, until one day, years later, while I was sitting, on a mournful rainy day, in the middle of a  Key West garden which had been wiped out by a vengeful hurricane,  I suddenly began to realize that while the garden had literally died it was being reborn right before my very eyes.

And just like that the clouds literally and figuratively parted.

The depression lifted off my shoulders like cobwebs of steamed heat.

It was such a powerful, life-changing event that to this very day I still feel its reverberation.

The reality is we all go through a series of rebirths.

And miscarriages.

We have many different lives.  We become many different people. 

 Looking back, sometimes we can barely recognize who we were or pretended to be.

Being the living artists that we are,  I think we all paint and re-paint the canvases of our souls, being careful to leave behind the pentimenti traces of who we were at any given moment not only for a point of reference but perhaps to enable ourselves to remember how deeply we were once capable of feeling.

It is vital that you find your own garden in order to actively participate in the much-needed ritual of your own resurrection.

Because given the times being that they are, we are spending way too much time defending ourselves, our point of view and our actions instead of recognizing the fact that many of us may be way past the point of expiration.

It just may be time to grow.