Monday, December 26, 2011

Almanac

As a kid I always loved almanacs. Maybe it was the collection of facts and records as they correlated to nature and the forces thereof. Lunar cycles coupled with the best times of harvest, the precise time the sun rose on a particular day for decades before...amazing. When I was a kid, it held a great swath of power over me and the way I saw things. It seemed to hold a chart for me that offered some consistency in a linear fashion of probability. It was, in essence, like a book of magic. As I grew, I for some reason lost interest in almanacs. Or maybe not lost interest in them but in the wonderment they held for me.

I tend to ruminate on things more these days. My past, my future, my current. I look at my mistakes and the successes and failures they've delivered to me. I look my acomplishments, great and small, and I see that which was lost and gained from them. I look at the things I have done for survival and how my need to continue breathing meant another would draw his last breath. In doing this, I find that in order to cope and process these various moments I list them in order of occurrence and the several reactions and results by each specific event. It will never, if I live to be 100, falter my amazement at how humans try to always rationalize and make sense of things. How some things can be so epically grand in their scope of  impact on the human mind and psyche that there lies a defiance of understanding yet we attempt it anyhow. So we build categories and containers to put it in and/or away.

Life is a collection of facts and incidents, moments and occurrences, split seconds in a small window of a day that tend to hold meaning forever. You will always remember that exact moment forever, reminding yourself each year at that very point of the moment, good or bad, that meant so much to you. We tend to clutch like a cornerstone, building our future upon it. It plays into our decisions and directs our paths. In it we take comfort in the notion that this is where our history and futures intersects, the common ground in which the tangible and intangible meet for the briefest of forevers and shape the next future history for us.

In all of this, I believe our lives are basically an almanac. A collection of moments and incidents, instances and chance happenings that serve as a linear history of who we are and our probability of that which we are to become. We find our true North in what we are, our history making and showing us the variables of what our paths have produced thus far. Our lives are our own individual almanacs, but they are all part of a larger significance. Our moments, be it sad or happy, cast an effect on others like ripples in a pond. We look back and see our past as a whole. Our almanac is a living, breathing history of what makes us. A standard almanac tracks things like time and tide. The almanac we create tracks our  lives and the sum of what we are...our own linear history. In that, I think I can maybe find that wonder again.

1 comment:

  1. Not sure if you're out there or not, but regardless, I don't understand how there aren't a million comments on your blog. If you are around, please let me know. Please.

    ReplyDelete