Nostalgia at 130 kph

There I am, rocketing along in my nicked-up C30 Volvo, belting out the chorus to Jeff Healey’s Angel Eyes: So tonight I’ll ask the stars above / “How did I ever win your love?” / What did I do / What did I say / To turn your angel eyes my way. To fully appreciate this, you have to understand that I can’t sing. The choir master at the boarding school I briefly attended asked me to sing softly. Healey died at 41 from the same cancer that stripped him of his eyesight at age two. What a mensch.

The now-ness of joy

That which is least interesting to me is my personal past—what I did or didn’t do, yesterday or at some other calendar point. Some assert that they take joy in the past. But of course they don’t. They take joy in the present.

The story of me

We all have our stories. They’re like husks in the garden of now.

Memory love

Lot’s wife looked back at her old life and was immediately turned into a lifeless pillar of desert salt. It was too bad, what happened to her, but she couldn’t help herself. She was nostalgic.

What was her name, Lot’s wife? No one remembers.

Cast off!

We cannot leave the wharf until we have cast off the lines.

Whatever we are attached to, we are bound by.

Mostly, we are bound by our emotions, wrapped up like perambulating mummies.

It’s all old material, loose threads, conditioned behaviours, nostalgia, memories, how it ought to be, how it could be, how it isn’t. Oh, man. It’s so bedraggled, sad and ridiculous. It’s a phase. (Could be a long one.)

Eventually the work starts—the work of ego stripping. We. Just. Peel. Off.