Quoting myself 10 years later

Recently, someone made fun of me — or perhaps she was teasing, because eventually she came back around, I think — about my being addicted (she did not use that word, no one ever does; we're all enablers) to making excessive social networking posts, and my answer was that I enjoyed the communication.

She disagreed that it was communication.

I eventually replied, using the same format as she despised, that I have always hated the phone, have phobias about the face-to-face, and have found of late that it's a bad idea to use one's real senses when encountering ex-lovers.

I was not so blunt, and she is not at all dull. I'm not sure where that will go now.

I hate the past when it encroaches on the present. How was I to tie up all loose ends, run out every kite string, pour out all my lingering and apparently unfulfilled affections?

I have always lamented (you can look it up in my paper-based archives; get them quick, paper is becoming extinct, you know) the sadness inherent in our limited possibilities, the unidirectional mandate of a single life trajectory of 80 or so years, most of them achy, either spent growing (ignorant) or declining (regretful) — and for some, spending the middle rearing offspring.

The idea of multiple lives, of reincarnation, was absolutely attractive to me, until I understood that Buddhism's purpose was to release one from both living and dying. The point of the cycles of life is to no longer be cycling. Spinning is bad? I thought motion implied growth, that change was essential to improvement. Ah, but if "perfection" and so-called inner peace descend, perhaps that is god-like, a stasis of wholeness and calm.

Bah, but here we linger in our bones, skin, blood and all the rest, stringy veins, pre-cancer, wrinkles, fatigue. Desire strikes every once in a while. A spark of perhaps flits across the usual routine. Routine always wins; fidelity to the actual over the potential is convenient … then spinning begins.