
Our lives were stored in our heads.
They hadn't begun, we were both sure
we'd know when they did.
They certainly weren't this.
We read, we listened to the portable radio.
Obviously this wasn't life, this sitting around
in colored lawn chairs.
- from "August," Louise Gluck
Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being victim of what I know? Life is not repetition." - Robert Henri
These two ideas, from the poet and the philosopher, explore the tension between imagined life and reality. The dream and the truth. What we dream our lives to be and the way we see them unfold. Do we see them unfold? As we while away the long summer days in lawn chairs, do we see this is life? The poet Louise Gluck observes, "Our lives were stored in our heads." Life, the very stuff spooled by our brains in the time spent constructing it in our heads. Sometimes we are not living, but re-living: absorbed in nostalgia, lost in musings, given to fixation on the past. Robert Henri warns us, "Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday."
There is something to be said for becoming tuned to the given moment, noting the quality of freshness. The expiring, momentary quality of the never-to-be-repeated. We may have sat in lawn chairs all summer, but if each day was in the company of a new friend and conversation, a new page in a book, held a unique insight, favorite tune on the radio, then the moments are not re-living but genuine. There is a difference I think between fresh and new. The "new" is something never before known, "fresh" is given to this day and may very well be familiar. The real punch line in the poem by Gluck is her young narrator's confident statement she would be sure when actual life began, when life as they imagined it would spread in technicolor across the white screen of their summer days. The future selves imagined contained like simple ungerminated seeds within the ordinary hours of their days.
What I know from the blessings of growing older are that the ordinary hours are the honey of life's busyness. We condense the swell of moments that link days to years in waves of freshly gathered experiences. Experiences that hang like heavy droplets of morning dew in the throat of an iris. We are this. This universe in the universe of one. And it is beautiful. And ordinary. The summer of books, the radio, and colored lawn chairs.
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They hadn't begun, we were both sure
we'd know when they did.
They certainly weren't this.
We read, we listened to the portable radio.
Obviously this wasn't life, this sitting around
in colored lawn chairs.
- from "August," Louise Gluck
Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being victim of what I know? Life is not repetition." - Robert Henri
These two ideas, from the poet and the philosopher, explore the tension between imagined life and reality. The dream and the truth. What we dream our lives to be and the way we see them unfold. Do we see them unfold? As we while away the long summer days in lawn chairs, do we see this is life? The poet Louise Gluck observes, "Our lives were stored in our heads." Life, the very stuff spooled by our brains in the time spent constructing it in our heads. Sometimes we are not living, but re-living: absorbed in nostalgia, lost in musings, given to fixation on the past. Robert Henri warns us, "Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday."
There is something to be said for becoming tuned to the given moment, noting the quality of freshness. The expiring, momentary quality of the never-to-be-repeated. We may have sat in lawn chairs all summer, but if each day was in the company of a new friend and conversation, a new page in a book, held a unique insight, favorite tune on the radio, then the moments are not re-living but genuine. There is a difference I think between fresh and new. The "new" is something never before known, "fresh" is given to this day and may very well be familiar. The real punch line in the poem by Gluck is her young narrator's confident statement she would be sure when actual life began, when life as they imagined it would spread in technicolor across the white screen of their summer days. The future selves imagined contained like simple ungerminated seeds within the ordinary hours of their days.
What I know from the blessings of growing older are that the ordinary hours are the honey of life's busyness. We condense the swell of moments that link days to years in waves of freshly gathered experiences. Experiences that hang like heavy droplets of morning dew in the throat of an iris. We are this. This universe in the universe of one. And it is beautiful. And ordinary. The summer of books, the radio, and colored lawn chairs.
Read More