totality and moments

Scene 1: The Hospital. The layout is an oblong rectangle of narrow corridors. Windowless. Dim lighting. Along with myself there are 4 other consistent characters to the nightly comedic drama. There is a rotating side cast of nurses who have periodic roles. Patients are unique side characters, often undeveloped. Apparel: scrubs. Mood: fluctuating between apathetic despondence and light-hearted amusement. Activities consist of pacing hallways, preparing medications, ordering and reordering priorities of action, mindlessly filling out papers. General conversation topic: sex.

Scene 2: Coffee Shop. A boxy, business friendly coffee purveyor. Enter. Couches on left. 3 tables against right wall. Coffee bar with 4 stools. Drink: espresso macchiato or iced americano depending on weather. Sit in padded chair, staring out panneled windows. Across the street, university museum and classrooms. The sky behind it seems like a canvas. The world is conveyed in two-dimensional backdrops. Rotating cast of baristas. Apparel: casual, comfortable. Mood: introverted, set on reading, wishing this coffee shop were cooler. Activities: reading, infrequent writing, drinking coffee, occasional conversation with employees. General topic of conversation: university life.

Scene 3: Bike Shop. An old car garage, converted to small town bike business. Lynn is the owner and sole employee. Conversation: whatever he has to say to get me to buy things.

Scene 4: Wal-Mart. Necessary hell.

Scene 5: Sligers Fruit Market. Merchants of locally grown produce. Successfully sold me mint plants, moonflowers, and the best grapefruit I've ever tasted. Cast: Farmers and Sunday gardeners; old people in general.

For another episode: Various friends' apartments. Taco Bell (for local flavor . . and no I don't mean the food). Church. The campus. Bike riding routes.

Other seasons: retrospective looks at life in Dallas, Arlington, Fort Worth, or various other locales where I have fallen into similar ruts.

I guess today I stared out the coffee shop window and realized how ridiculous it is being an adult. When I was a kid my parents rarely let me out of our neighborhood without adult accompaniment. So, therefore I got really good at wandering around my neighborhood, and I remember it feeling enormous. I thought there was an endless plethora of things to explore. Now, I've grown up, and the world is bigger, and yet so often it seems there's nothing to explore anymore. I stared across the street today at this strange building and it looked like a mere painted silhouette, like there was nothing in it or behind it. The hospital I'm employed at also carries the feeling of a movie set. It fulfills its function, but makes me feel as though the world outside of it is but a figment that we hear about in elementary school.

When I'm not working or drinking coffee, I'm usually driving around the commercial circuit here in brownwood, trying to buy whatever it is I think might sooth my sense of need or want. Fortunately there's less here to throw my money away on, and still I manage quite well. I was born to consume.

Life isn't all bad. I've been riding my bike much more recently. The spring weather is too good to pass up. So, I've been riding to get in shape, and just as much, to break away from the ruts I always feel I'm wearing into the concrete of any town I live in. I've been taking Lynn's recomendations on good roads to ride. He, in turn, takes my money for some other gadget I need to make it as a bike rider. I guess it's been worth it. Yesterday I took a 25 mile loop out of town that took me through some breath-taking hill country. The hillsides were coated in wild flowers. Yellow and red patches covering the duskily shaded slopes across valleys. One-lane farm roads narrowly carve their course as divinely arranged hedges push in on the pavement. And, winded as I am, I feel my own breath evolving. It's as though the fragrance of spring found a way to overwhelm the cynicism of my spirit's winter. Then I emerge and am drawn back to the town where I live by the gravity that society holds.

I often find my heart panicked to leave everything behind in the search for greener pasture. I think I've realize lately how guilty I am of fleeing whatever becomes familiar. And not that I lament the action of leaving, only the spirit in which I have often done so. If I haven't burned my bridges, I certainly have habitually neglected them and left them in disrepair. I guess it springs from a sense I have long had that my past, anyone's past, is chasing at my heals waiting to engulf me. To drown me. At every different stage of my life I have arrived by an utter break with the stage I am emerging from. I don't know why other than an unrelenting fear that meaninglessness is preceded by familiarity. So I run. Again and again, I run. Then with every new season of my life, I carry a disquieted heart that waits for a sense of anything usual, or common. And at such apprehension I shake violently and restlessly until I am free. I am thoroughly aquainted with the frigid loneliness this brings. I would choose it anyway.

In this way I find myself like some mythic action hero, constantly finding narrow escape from that force, that monster one step behind me, waiting to take my life. I am a rider desperately straining to outrun what I can best name as "the old". I know that if it catches me everything will be rigid, lifeless, sterile. At least that's what I've always thought.

I also recall feeling that "the new" was the place of freedom. It was the belief that life was a commodity "out there", somewhere apart from the drudgery of my current state. Here in the midst of my numbered routines I merely suffered helplessly as everything grew old, and the avalanche gained power waiting to destroy me. Every day fell through the waist of the hour glass, and left me striving to escape my own burial. If I could grasp this rope and pull myself into the newness of the day. Times came where it seemed possible, and no doubt this was a subtle form of insanity but also the only hope I could manage to find. Doubtlessly there were countless wise men and sages, with Jesus leading their chorus, telling me of the futility of this longing, but their words never made it beyond cognitive approval; my heart remaining in a desperation and disbelief. I was burdened by the insatiable thirst to be truly free, and in freedom to find the newness of the day that purported to bestow meaning into my life. Inevitably freedom remained illusive, and newness grew old, and I was weary with the increasingly ominous shadow that the past threw in my path. I ran harder, and the dark ceased to fall behind. It's length increased in front of me as every moment marked its mass increasing. In the calm before its calamity I felt a nostalgic whisper, numbness, saying become nothing more than what you once were. My soul was faltering, and tired.

Then I find myself on a bicycle, cresting hills into beauty that is beyond my ability to grasp, and I don't stop. I look behind me, and peripherally I catch nothing dark, only the same beauty that engulfs the road in front and the road behind. And there I know that the past is not so fearful, nor is the future near as promising as I have always supposed. Clarity rises in the faith that salvation is not past or future, but always now. It is not memory nor looking forward that should serve me as hope, but only and always what I am looking at.

I descend one last hill and cross the highway onto Austin Avenue. I slide comfortably into one of my usual concrete ruts and ride back to my house. I will leave these circles of familiarity one day for something else "new". I realize though, now, that life will not fall on me upon escaping this place, and inhabiting another. Every place has the same potential for two-dimensional reduction. The scenes may change, but the storylines always carry the potential to seem scripted and monotonous. Life though, carries a potential for a freedom beyond all this. It is a freedom not from past or future, but from the desperation of control. It is a freedom leading into the present, the immediate. This is where life is found: as I walk these streets, or tread beyond them, suspended graciously, weightlessly between a past and a future.