I woke suddenly, straight up in bed, at 8:15 this morning, for me a very early hour. It would be interesting to know when Roman's mother went in for surgery.
I forgot today is a holiday, so most of my to do list is undoable. I've got to buy a new tape for the phone, look into that exercise place, sell a few thousand shares of Exxon (my stomach clenches just thinking that) and IBM (good riddance), get the van's oil changed, deposit some checks, pay some bills, and write some letters. I can do only the last two today, so I guess I'll fill in with some basement clearing.
I went to the gas station for raspberry iced tea this morning, and bantered with Tall Dark & Handsome II. He was teasing me that he couldn't give me my change, and I said that would be fine, we could do credit, I'd use up credit in a few days anyway. He said credit was no good because if he dropped dead tonight, no one else would give it to me. I said put it in writing, "writing survives death. Remember that. In fact, write your autobiography tonight."
It came off the top of my head, but it is true. Writing survives death, and change. You read now something that you wrote ten years ago, and you are amazed at how much you have grown and changed, how much more you know now than you knew then.
But the only way you can read it ten years from now is to write it now.
When I was in therapy, twenty five years ago, I wrote and wrote and wrote, several composition books full. Afterward, I got a big stapler and stapled the pages together, because I was still too close to that thinking, and it was dangerous for me to read it, but at the same time I didn't want to destroy it. I'm thinking about removing the staples and reading it all again. Wouldn't it be nice to think "Oh, how silly!", to not be able to recognize the person who wrote it.
TD&H II, by the way, did give me my change.
2 comments:
A few years ago I came across a couple of composition books that were my journals in my late teens and early twenties. I started reading some of what I wrote and I started feeling ill. So, I ripped the pages out and burned them in my wood burning stove. I didn't need to re-hash the life I'd lived then, because my current life was much better and I was so much smarter - I was almost embarrassed by what I'd written, not that anyone else was reading it but me. I think it's sometimes best to let go of the past and focus on the now and yet to be.
One of the things I had to learn in therapy was that the past is very much a part of me, it's a part of what has gone into making me what I am. When I tried to reject the past, I was fractured, not integrated. I had to learn to accept the past and assimilate it.
Because it is past, however, I know that it does not define me now. Those thinking patterns have changed. The notebooks represent patterns I have redesigned using the lessons I have learned.
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