the high water mark
Six months ago I sat in my Milwaukee apartment on a nice sunny day and I was miserable. I was living like a dead man, anticipating the inevitable end and rebirth that comes with big changes. I didn’t think about the moment at hand, which in hindsight was blissful, and focused instead on my demise. I was on the verge of ending my college tenure, and with no job in sight and the reality of a liberal arts degree sinking into the lake of my mind. I let fear and uncertainty creep into my happy state of existence. The irony is I am now freezing my ass off in Tokyo with a shit job and no money and I am probably worse off than I was six months ago.
The truth is, I wasn’t really miserable six months ago. I was finishing up what was the time of my life. But I didn’t think about the task at hand and looked instead at it’s impending end. I now know that to live like that is to live like you are already dead. The final end that is always impending is the ultimate one and I am aware that eying it on the horizon is tantamount to awaiting it eagerly. But I never suspected that it is the same way with all the little deaths and subsequent births along the way. Until recently I spent my bad times waiting for the future, waiting and wishing a better time would come. I spent the good times doing this, too. Sure, I enjoyed them while they lasted, but I always had one eye on the horizon. Perhaps the meticulous structure of adolescence had something to do with it. I was a freshman in high school and I couldn’t wait to be a senior. I was a freshman in college and I couldn’t wait to be a senior. I am now a freshman in Life and I hope senior year never comes. That is only a hope but what is certain is that it won’t be in four years, not in eight years, not for a long time.
On the other hand, beginnings are not such a great thing to look forward to either. Beginnings are always preceded by endings, and usually lapses in time. From my last day of school in June to my first day of work in November, I spent my days in this strange Not Time of idleness and anticipation. I had secured my position as an indentured servant in Japan, pretending to teach English to English hungry Japanese. I wanted to leave immediately. Bureaucracy wanted me to wait for three months. So I waited, and instead of embracing my moment outside of time I tried with futility to push it forward like some heavy burden. Finally, many months after my college Death, I was Born as an ‘adult’ in a different place. But birth is just another kind of death—a reverse death.
So, as I sit hear in my gypsy hovel of a guest house wearing a shirt and no pants, my ass cheeks sticking to the linoleum on my chair, I now know that neither Birth nor Death are where I want to be. Instead I put my mind in the middle part of things. It seems like an obvious notion to me now, and maybe the gray matter knew it, but the lizard brain holding the strings didn’t know it. I’ve always thought of myself as a person who lives in the moment, but I wasn’t, and in any case, what I’m thinking of now is not a life spent in the moment—I have plans, I have a direction and ambitions—rather, it’s a life which embraces the present as the one true thing. It is the perpetual high water mark, the always blooming lotus on the mud bed of time.
