NO THING IS FOR SURE
Monday, Dec. 30, 2019
Life is.
Death is.
Truth is illusion and confusion.
Yet private thoughts are never false, never could be for you or for me.
Lyrics and lines do not equal truth or factual or actual – we think they do and accept them as real because the words are familiar.
For instance – “Love means never having to say you are sorry,” a great line from the movie Love Story. It was a profound new saying back then, in 1970 – in the era of other literary wisdom from those days like far out, in your face, the man, your mama, catch you on the flip-side, chill, keep on truckin’, book, copasetic, and the most over-worked on of that time, for sure.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble – it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. – Mark Twain
What do you know for sure?
I was watching Love Story on TV on Saturday night, realizing it was 49 years since I’d seen the original, and Ali Magraw still gets me excited, but that’s not the point, though it is the jumping-off point.
I’ve never heard anything more nonsense-ical than that statement about not saying you are sorry. But there are so many conflicts between statements and truth which go well beyond political rhetoric of the day.
As we come to the end of another decade, we are reminded by the media of the end of the last century, the Y2K scare that turned out to be nothing of consequence or danger. Or should we call it a nothing-burger?
Thoughtfully though, in this ocean of information woven with misinformation and disinformation, it is incredible when we can grasp any sense of meaning from anything – everything gets so distorted. As can relationships between people who tell truth, in part; who tell part the truth part of the time and leave out the rest. Like context, location, background, and characteristics of the parties.
Love story was set during the Vietnam war, during the draft, and during a time of riots, protests, and campus unrest. None of that in the movie. Magraw dies of some mysterious disease, symptoms of which are that the victim gets better and better looking until the end.
Chick-flick of its day, Love Story, and that quote are not real – someone’s fiction, yet the movie became a cult classic and one of the most successful films of all time.
Nothing new or old is real, or false – the only reality we know is the one inside our head – a private life, a life of compartmentalized and continual recalculation, never duplicated by anyone, never wholly known by anyone else. Our secret thoughts are true to us, our memories are real – whether they happened or not.
This new year, like the one we’ve just used up (for some, we’ve made it more worthwhile than any other; for some, it’s been a waste, a bust, a year not forgotten – but best forgotten) has been, for me, a foundational year for new things which will make the next 365 days, worth every effort I give them.
And that’s it, right? Our days are worth what we do with them – whether thinking deeply, dreaming wildly, lifting heavy things, or being lightly lifted to float above all things…
The weight of everything up until now can be the anchor that holds us back or that rocky cliff we leap from. What we do, it will be real. It will be a fact. It will be stunning, performed for an audience of only one. Ages from now all that will remain will be bits and pieces on paper, or etched in granite, impressed upon the earth and a handful of minds who care, who remember, that 2020 was the year when nothing mattered more to you – or to me – that what we do and how we live, what we think about and talk about and write about; never better, ever, than anything we’ve done before.
It is so simple.
Zero calories required to make this life-affirming decision.
It need not be published anywhere or shouted from roof-tops, it can echo enough inside our mind where all things important are created and stored.
No thing is for sure, because everything is.
