“Moments” are short posts of a rather “poetic – existential” taste
NOVEMBER 2020
[26] The hasty month
** We were enjoying some coffee with my friend Tony F. It has been some time that we could not arrange to see each other and we were happy with that coffee. At some moment Tony leaves his cup on the table and very seriously says:
** “Well this month rushed in and then rushed out – I have no idea where it went or why it went so fast”.
** At first I smiled because I found it cute. But then I froze – and I left too my cup on the table.
** Somehow, without knowing how or why, the word “month” was substituted by the word “my life…”
** Happy and unhappy memories of moments, dreams, hopes and wishes, expectations, pains and agonies, past or expected joys and intense pleasures of both my flesh and mind, everything in the core of my being swirled like the white mist of a blizzard.
** And me, stunned and wondering, I was seeing the vivid mist moving and slowly disappearing with the mortal glory of a hurricane.
** I turned pale. The next sip of my coffee was the warm breath of the whole world reaching deeply my insides.
[27] The old and the new cat: Losing – Having
** I remember when my little nephew’s cat died. The cat was old enough but still it was a huge loss for my nephew, because of their very strong bond. I caught myself tending to suggest to him to get a new cat.
** I knew very well that he should stay for a while with the grief and then see if and when he might get a new cat. However, as I empathized with my nephew’s sadness, I felt this strong pulse rising from my guts: a pulse denying loss and tending to substitute what was just lost.
** I was surprised by the primary power of this pulse, no matter that I mentally knew the necessity of grief. I got out to have a coffee and stay for a while with what was happening in my tiny personal universe.
** After two coffees, I managed to re-connect with myself. I finally sensed deeply that losing and having make one unbreakable wholeness. Seeing losing as the opposite of having makes losing the antagonist of having – and the contrary.
** And this results to an inner split. A very torturing one. Because neither loosing nor having can win – they are both aspects of life. It is a futile war resulting to stress and agony.
**Instead, seeing losing and having as two aspects of one wholeness, of being alive, maybe does not diminish the pain of loss. However, it offers a very deep sense of “balance”, of accepting the overall nature of things.
** And whenever I manage to reach and accept this balance, I feel a deeper calmness. That kind of calmness beyond joy and sadness, able to become the background from which painful or joyful moments of this life may spring up.
** I did not suggest to my nephew to get a new cat. We buried together with him and my sister his dead cat, we remembered moments of his life with the cat, we cried and laughed. After one year my nephew got a dog. A little beautiful dog, promissing countless new nuances of feelings about having and losing.
[28] Past
** We cannot change the physical events themselves of the past because there is no time machine.
However, we can change the meaning we give to the past events, in our present time.
**Example: one had very hard childhood. On the background of a child’s being this was devastating – had a meaning A.
From the adult present, this person cannot get rid of the past events of a past childhood.
**However, this person, form his/her adult background, can give to the same past events a new present meaning B, different from the past meaning A.
**The simplicity of these thoughts does not mean that such a process is something that we do by turning a button.
It is a long way of enriching experientially our awareness and integrating in our precious now frozen past experiences of threat, pain and sorrow.
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