Questions and Answers

Here's the question: How did I become me, you become you and, by extension, this country become what it is today? I didn't see it coming; neither myself or the trajectory of our republic. 

I remember myself as a shy, athletic kid who secretly thought he knew everything. I have shed my shy, lost my leap and I know less and less as I move into whatever's next.

I had some of Spencer Tracy in me, a chunk of Gregory Peck and a bit of Woody Allen. No Gable or Wayne. Later I had aspirations to be Ken Burns, Basho and Barack. Who am I forgetting? Gene Kelly and Charlie Parker, why not? I used to worship FDR but now I think much more of Eleanor. 

So we pilgrim our way along battered and blessed by the unforeseen. Maybe we fall on our face. Maybe we gain some grace. Maybe we are met and from that new selves might emerge.

In the end I have no simple answer. Life itself has too many twists in the labyrinth. There is no GPS to retrace our footprints or tell us what's around the corner. Instead we mythologize our journey as if the map were the territory.

On a macro scale I am preparing myself for the sound and fury told by an idiot. Our decline as a nation is the tragedy inherent in power and an indifferent public. Yet even that is not a simplistic straight line. Awareness, compassion and justice accompanies ignorance and malice. In the same way medical science comes with nescience. 

Movies gave me the illusion that all questions have answers. Wrongs would be righted in the dream palace. In real life, at that point, as a certified know-it-all, I had all the answers. In fact, I was so weighed down with them I forgot the questions. It has taken me nine decades to learn that questions are more important than answers. I get curiouser and curiouser. Cats can die from that.       

My unsolicited advice to my granddaughter is: do not listen to gurus or assorted sages of indeterminate age and especially not to authoritarian voices with a pocketful of promises. The state of the world we elders have bequeathed to the young is reason enough to doubt our imagined wisdom. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt to catch up on history and civics books, particularly those that have been banned in proto-fascist states.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, metaphorically, of course, with your stiletto questions. Haul the poseur in for interrogation. Shine the big light on him and hook him with question marks.