moving on

Neil and I have been going through cupboards and drawers, dividing things into keep, Goodwill and garbage. Last week I was overwhelmed with a bunch of letters from recent years.

Glancing through the letters was a rather painful experience. People had taken the time in February 2006 to sit down and write their thoughts or express congratulations or whatever, and now that moment was gone forever. So I could keep the card as a relic of the moment, but the moment I'd just had was that it was painful that what had passed was no more. So ... the card would be a relic of the pain associated with the distance between February 2006 (or whatever date) and now. And it's not even pain, exactly -- just the bittersweet tic-toc of mortality.

Moving makes everything seem suddenly less meaningful. Forests become trees. Like there's a family photograph on our living room table, and I was cleaning recently and put it flat, thinking, "We're not even 'living' in this room anymore, no need for the decorative charade." And then an expression of life became a photo and I had to sit down and think about that for a minute.

But I digress. I was anxious about sorting through all these letters because they seemed to be little more than "emotional baggage." But then I would think, "Well, they're reminders of who these people are (because they're going to die someday)." And then I would think, "What was that that you just thought in parentheses? That's messed up, Diana! Everybody's going to die someday! Nobody cares if you keep these stupid letters or not. Nobody cares. You will never look back on this birthday card from 2007 and be so happy you kept it. Throw it the freak away. Throw it all away."

So I did, mostly, and immediately felt more calm. Some of the stuff I looked through bore record of events over which I had expended much anxiety and heartache at one time, and I was a trifle shocked to note that, while I recalled said intense feelings, I cared not a jot now.

Which brings me to a second musing: Last week I saw online a quote from Jonathan Safran Foer that said something like, "The only thing worse than being sad is letting others know you're sad." The next morning I read about a memoir that some woman is publishing about how she dated Steven Tyler in the 1970s and he wanted her to have an abortion and he went to the hospital when she did it and snorted coke during the procedure. My initial responses were, "He's a rock star, what do you want?" and "What do I care about your story?" Then I thought about why my reaction was so unsympathetic and I looked at her story through Foer's quote on sadness.

I think the reason it is good and healthy for people to "move on" is because the universe is moving on anyway. Before I saw moving on as putting away old dreams, taking a match to them maybe, and forging on, hoping a new life would eventually assemble itself. But that's the thing: a new life will assemble itself. That's the nature of the earth turning and bloody wounds becoming scabs, then scars, and flowers growing. After thinking about the quote and the woman's memoir, I think "moving on" is important because everything else reliably is going to move on. It's a law of nature. And everybody has a personal set of scars to show for it.

That said, I wonder if I can move on from thinking about the bittersweet tic-toc of mortality, because it's kind of a downer. What does the scar look like for that?