thinkfetti

Our lives are not, to borrow from the language of physics, lived in “conservative fields.”

This is not a physics classroom, but I’d like you to understand my metaphor. The presence of a conservative field means there is a quantity that depends on where you are, but not how you got there. For example, the energy stored in a slingshot’s rubber strap depends on how far the strap is stretched. If it’s stretched 25 cm, it has a certain amount of energy that can be used to accelerate the slingshot’s projectile. If you stretch and unstretch and stretch the slingshot again and then pause at the point when the strap is stretched 25 cm, it will still have the same amount of available energy. If you very, very gradually stretch the strap, over a period of hours even, by the time you stop stretching at a total stretch of 25 cm, again the energy stored up will be the same.

If our lives were lived in a conservative field, where/what we are now would make all the difference, regardless of what paths we created or followed to get here. More than saying “the end justifies the means,” we would be in the strange situation of having the means not “mean” anything whatsoever.

This thought becomes intolerable when we think about the ends of our lives, because if all that mattered were where we were, what of all this living that happens in between our births and deaths?

Here is an Allen Ginsberg poem, which I’m quoting from his Illuminated Poems (with art by Eric Drooker — and please buy the book to support great, important books like it):

In Death, Cannot Reach What I Most Near

We know all about death that
we will ever know because
we have all experienced
the state before birth.
Life seems a passage between
two doors to the darkness.
Both are the same and truly
eternal, and perhaps it may
be said that we meet in
darkness. The nature of time
is illuminated by this
meeting of eternal ends.

It is amazing to think that
thought and personality
of man is perpetuated in
time after his passage
to eternity. And one time
is all Time if you look
at it out of the grave.

My wife and I are very, very lucky to still have our parents with us. It is very hard to see any of them uncomfortable or suffering, and we know that although sometimes all we can do is offer moral support, and share the burdens that come with being granted a life, that offering and sharing does matter.

The how of living is everything, as far as I can tell.