The Tenth Anniversary Of My Return To Earth
It’s been 10 years today and impossible for me not to consider how I’ve used this gift of time – to what advantage, with what learning, and in what state of harmony between my inner-self and the outer-life I live.
When I woke up this morning I had a fleeting temptation to be critical of the use I’ve made of these years, maybe expecting of myself – given the gift of a decade – that I should be scrambling up from sleep on the side of a sacred mountain near Nepal; be playing my fortune forward by waking between shifts as a volunteer at an aid station for people fleeing a war zone, admiring the contours of biceps I could have developed, the outcomes of the social change I might have championed.
There are of course the noticeable things we do after significant life events; we change our diets, change our schedules. We start exercising; retreat to chairs, lower our fat intake; increase the booze. We manage money or let it flow. We cry more easily, laugh more readily. We share more; we share less.; get a dog – vow that there could never be another. We move. Redecorate. We openly regret. We say goodbye. We say hello. We put tattoos on our arms; our hands on our ears. We become believers: unbelievers – chanters, kneelers, breathers, feelers.
I don’t know what people would observe about me; if I seem different or the same. I know, that like others, what I do and what I feel can reside at some distance from each other, a dissonance that arises in our consciousness when a crisis or emergent event occurs – when something happens that puts our inner-selves and our feelings at odds with the outer-lives we try to maintain.
I’ve realized the urgency to bring a balance to this dissonance several times in my life; at points in my careers, for example, when what I was doing for a living was so greatly at odds with what I imagined for myself, or when I’ve recognized that the negativity of another person or a situation consistently made me feel in conflict with what I’d like to feel. And certainly when I arrived home on that first day from the hospital and stood before a mirror and saw not so much the reflection of a scarred and unfamiliar body as I did an expression of puzzled gratitude and inner-resolve.
Gratitude and the resolve to live one’s life more authentically can encounter barriers over a period of ten years. There have been the challenging days and weeks, the losses, the health issues experienced by my family – our friends, the terrible news that arrives from the outside world, the things that threaten to break loose in my aging body when I lift something too heavy at the gym and sometimes merely from a sneeze. Gratitude and this second chance haven’t always facilitated my honesty nor prevented me from becoming impatient or irritated, insensitive, or in a state of disbelief. It hasn’t eased the wince that my ego has felt as doctors have begun to defer my complaints to my age, or eased the pain of seeing men wearing pajama bottoms in the grocery store.
However, in my ordinary life, the experience of a decade ago has impacted my awareness of the unnecessary curtain that can exist between our ordinary, work-a-day lives and the need of our souls for a life of authentically.
I don’t remember most of the books I read to our children and grandchildren when they were young, but I do remember how I liked reading them The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams; the gruff voice I used for the Skin Horse, the snobbish scoffing of my nose as I mimicked the Mechanical Toys, and the wild interchanges of the real rabbits that lent themselves to theatrics.
‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’
‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’
‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams
What have I learned in these past ten years?
“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.”
We get to make choices in our singular days. Added together, whether numerous or scant, the choices we make will be considered the life we have led. We have the opportunity each day, each moment, to express the unseen and unspoken; to love, respect, create, share, stand up for, risk, enjoy, perceive, protect, and to become aware that little of this life is about us – but very much that follows could be because of us.
I think I need to cut the guy wearing pajamas at the grocery store a little slack.
January 12, 2020, 10:30 p.m. 
Banner photograph by Ryan McGuire / Epilogue photograph by David Mark
Fred, thank you for sharing your reflection on these ten years. You just capture your thoughts so beautifully in writing.
Coming to know you Sam has been one of the gifts.