All I Do Not Know

Tracing and retracing routes across the city I've followed thousands of times; still always seeing new details. Just a glance here and there -- the screen of a flat-panel TV displaying programming through two windows -- one in the house and one in my car. A dark-haired woman out for a stroll and a smoke, smiling at me as I piled the kids into the car. I wonder who she is?

Inside Safeway, an Asian woman in a black coat was waiting for her coffee at the Starbucks counter while I was checking out. For some reason, her presence exerted a power on me. Then, a few blocks away, she passed me, carrying her coffee while I pumped gas into my little gray car.

Then again, a few moments later, as I navigated through traffic toward my house, there she was again, still cradling a coffee and still walking determinedly somewhere. I'm quite sure she never noticed me, and also that I'll never see her again.

Or maybe I will.

Some very sad news tonight: An old friend has passed suddenly and unexpectedly. I'm feeling sad, especially for her family; I just saw them two months ago for the first time in a while. She was a private person, so I will not say any more about this here.

Another reminder of how fragile we all are, how limited our time here is, and how if we don't seize opportunities when they present themselves, they may never come our way again.

Jesus I am bad at disconnection. I don't admire people better at this than I am because I cannot understand them at all. The loneliest moments in life are those awful moments of disconnection when it was the last thing you thought would happen.

Some people do more nice things than others do. Nice people don't do nice things to be nice; they do them because they are nice.

Maybe it's a good thing, I tell myself, that I am noticing little details again for the first time in a while.

My daughter painted the picture at the top of this post earlier tonight. It might be a city, she said, or it might be a set of panels set up one next to the other.

As the words keep tumbling out of me, I know that what I'm actually doing here is trying to connect. Ninety-nine percent of the people who read these words never contact me and that's okay. The occasional person who says they like my writing, that they get something from it, they are the ones who keep me going.

Rarely, but it happens, I sense a new reader. Actually, that has only happened once. That was a most special circumstance that won't be repeating itself, I know. Yet someone might be reading these words on their last night alive on earth; or, one of these times, the blending of letters and words and sentences and paragraphs may be the last ones that ever come out of me on this earth. It's bound to happen sooner or later.

That is why I write. You never know when it will be your last time. The reason I hate disconnection? Isn't it clear: we all will be disconnecting, not by our choice, one of these days, so why would we ever do it purposely?

Of course, feelings change, sometimes in mysterious ways, and people part.  Just as suddenly as we find one another we can lose one another. The real question is whether we can ever find one another after all of that has happened?

That's one of many questions I do not know the answer to. In fact, tonight, maybe it's the weather, or my sadness -- mainly about the trials of others -- or maybe it is a gradually unfolding epiphany, but I'm acutely aware that I know nothing much at all. I'm still discovering how much I don't know day over week over month over year.

Two seagulls, large, white and gray, lift off in front of my car as I round a corner. Their powerful wingspans take a moment to unfurl; I take my foot off the accelerator instinctively and then realize what a foolish thing that was of me to do. Your car cannot ever catch a seagull, any more than can a dog chasing them at the beach.

My voracious reading habit has expanded to Kevin Kelly's brilliant new book, What Technology Wants. I know Kevin from my Wired years; he's always been far out ahead of any curve having to do with what is broadly known as the digital revolution.

His idea that technology is a living force, just as much as we are, and that it in fact is much older than homo sapiens on this planet, is provocative.  That technology is reproducing itself now, outside of any human influence, may frighten some people.

But read the book and you will be comforted.

The sun rises, the sun sets. Your heart soars with the happiness of a new love; then it is broken into a thousand shards that will cut you for weeks, months, maybe even years. Maybe it will even be the death of you. The world at large doesn't care -- how could it? While one person nurses his broken heart, another person has just died. While one person dances with a new lover, another person walks out of someone's door, never to return.

Disconnecting = human folly. You cannot ever disconnect your heart from another's. It doesn't work that way. The problem is that most of us do not know how to listen to what our hearts are trying to tell us. We mistake one feeling for another; we try to suppress the inconvenient feelings as if that will ever be a productive strategy.

Instead, those damn feelings you think you didn't want rise up to disrupt your carefully laid new plans, which assumed that they would do no such thing. Whenever you are nursing a broken heart, people say things like -- go out, meet new people, move on!

That's okay. They mean well. But if keeping moving on and on was all our species needed to reproduce itself, we'd all be itinerant lovers. I have a theory about this, like about most things. (Again, bear in mind that I do not believe I know much of anything; therefore I construct theories all the time, rarely with enough evidence to fill a demi-cup of coffee.)

My love theory goes like this: There is a finite store among us, collectively, so for every heart broken another is given the gift of new love. If this theory is right, we just have to wait for our turn. But it also is another form of sadness, isn't it? For you to find a new love, somebody else has to lose theirs. Sometimes those events are inextricably intertwined, but I don't want to get into that topic.

After they cleared my car, the seagulls gracefully rose into the sky, banked west, and headed out toward the Pacific Ocean. Since I was driving, I couldn't really watch them for more than an instant, so I followed them instead with my mind's eye.

Out over the city, past the beach, high above the waves, I could see them traveling on and on; I don't know why. Perhaps they were headed for a distant land, where all the habits are different from here, even among the birds.

Maybe. Or maybe it was just another one of those sensations that visit me, why or from where all shrouded in mystery. Why would this idea even occur to me? Does it mean something? Rather than birds, maybe what I glimpsed flying away were souls passing beyond this life to whatever lies beyond.

It can be, from time to time, that your senses can be as finely tuned as one of those tuning forks the people back in my boyhood used to locate the most likely place to drill a well. You don't even realize it, but a tiny vibration comes back to you from someone, somewhere who is thinking about you.

Maybe it is a fleeting thought, or maybe it is a prayer. People do pray for one another, especially in times of great stress and sadness. I'm not much good at praying, I've decided. This came up in the bathtub recently. I don't take showers in cold weather; I only take baths. I'm not one to linger in there usually; it's just a matter of getting clean, not some sensuous delight -- at least for me.

But on this occasion, and it may have been the day before yesterday, or maybe further back, I'm not sure. This is not exactly the kind of thing I would normally take note of, but as I knelt there in my bath I suddenly felt like bowing my head and praying.

The first big problem at such moments for me is deciding which god to pray to, but that is easily solved if I just choose to pray to all the gods, whoever and wherever they may be.  (If there was really only one, why would different cultures pray to different gods?  I'm afraid I do not accept the concept that any one race or tribe is the chosen one. To me that is all bullshit, and it always has been.)

The second big problem is bigger than the first one. Because once I solved #1 by praying to a variety of gods, I had to decide what I was praying for. What exactly was it that I wanted to beseech these gods to do for me, anyway?

Well, of course, all of the normal and basic things about health and safety for family, friends and loved ones. Sometimes I forget to include myself in there but on this particular day I remembered and hastily added in a conditional clause that brought me into the picture, hoping that this would be okay with the gods.

After that, however, I was truly stumped. What did I want to pray for? I'll confess I did think of one thing, but I'd already asked for that so many times with no results that the gods have lost their credibility on that topic -- or maybe it was never mine to ask for, anyway.

In the embarrassing silence that followed, none of the gods offered me any help with finding some words to speak. Funny, eh? A writer, a story-teller with no words to speak? But that's the way it was so I abandoned the effort; maybe it was a simple case of prayer-block.

Or maybe the gods don't want to hear from me the things I want to say. That is a sobering thought, but it could well be true. I actually have another theory about that -- about what the gods can handle from us collectively. It may not be as direct as my theory of love, in other words you may not have to wait for someone to lose what it is you are praying for in order to get it. The gods may be more enterprising than that.

Instead, maybe the gods accept your silence in the moment and come back to you later on, with an image that you will have to figure out on your own. From my reading of religious texts (the Bible, the Koran, and a number of Buddhist tracts) I'm leaning to the latter theory.

So maybe that is the why of the seagulls, or maybe even of that striking Asian woman in the black coat, or the mysterious woman who smiled at me in the night, or maybe even why my daughter's painting feels so precious to me on this particular night.

Or maybe it's just one more of the many questions that I don't know the answer to.

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