We are rarely prepared for what we know is coming
Words & images © Paul Ransom
You know it will happen. Perhaps you even mentally rehearse, extrapolating from the experience of others, or empathising with characters in books and films. Then it happens and…no, not really prepared.
As I type, I find myself reflecting on the surprising impact of the predictable. Since the start of the month, two old friends have slammed into the wall. One is now recovering from major surgery, the other trying to wrap head and heart around a potentially terminal diagnosis.
Some mornings offer little evidence of evening.
On the day the latter was given the news, I trundled routinely through the hours. Writing, walking, watching You Tube videos about futons and football. I have already forgotten much of it. In contrast, my friend’s day is etched in memory. The day his life changed course.
I think now of his wife, and of what will surely change for her.
Today, I sit in the mild discomfort of imagining. One day – maybe later this afternoon – I will have a more immediate experience. I do not know when that time will arrive, only that I wait in line.
Inevitably, my thoughts drift to aging parents, both in their eighties. In the foreseeable future the phone will ring. There will be a rupture, and I will move to the front of the queue.
So too, I ponder my contemporaries, none of us getting any younger. Losing shape, gaining weight. More aches, less recovery.
There is a deep beauty to all this fragility, just as the inevitable is profoundly liberating. Easy things to say on this side of the line. Perhaps my two affected friends would find such pontification blithe and insulting.
Nevertheless, our suffering and mortality are habitually airbrushed or explained away. Mostly, they need to be. The absurdity of our condition would likely be too much to bear otherwise. We all carry on in the knowledge of stopping, so long as the edge of that knowing is sufficiently rounded.
The true genius of acknowledging the inevitable is the art of forgetting. Of not being in a permanent state of readiness. This, for now, is what I tell myself.
Therefore, despite the gathering and irrefutable evidence of entropy, I suspect I will stumble into the predictable impact without protective headgear. In the light of what has happened this month to my two friends, I am more acutely aware of this. More grateful for the health and capacity I still have, and for the all-round facility my body and mind still afford me.
Indeed, maybe gratitude is the best form of preparation we have for the mundane disruptions of the unforeseen foreseeable.
Then again, that could be a sickening middle class platitude. Our appointments with death and disease may never be neatly circled on a calendar – just as they ought not be dismissed with pop-psych mush – and we will probably turn up for them totally under prepared. For all our cleverness, knowing almost nothing.
In the meantime, I idle with thoughts of friends; and others, more distant, who I have known. Some will never return. Others will, but transformed. Of those who remain (relatively) intact, all will eventually know the ordinary shock of decline. Abrupt and accidental, or gradual and grinding. And I will wake up one day and walk with them into the gathering dark.
But I won’t think too much about that. Until I have to.
As If You Were Listening 