I’ve been staring out the window, at the setting sun…overcome with a strange sense of melancholy.
Something about this weekend, following the coverage of the disastrous death of the Polish President & the Katyn anniversary, has made me sit back in contemplation of all sorts of sad, mournful states…particularly our fragile mortality. Sometimes I believe that the streak of Polish fatalism within me is my most frightening quality.
This week’s Doctor Who episode contributed to this: a story about loss, and trying to ignore it…trying to erase it…but managing to bubble to the surface, regardless of effort, intent, or hope. I feel like the Doctor, at the climax…gazing out through a viewport, dwarfed by the vista of the unknowable universe…thinking…what?
There are days when I think Hobbes had it right on the nose, about our nasty, brutish and short existence. There are days I wonder if I’m making a damn bit of difference in the world…days I wonder if my young protoges & padawans will succeed in their ambitious lives…days I pray passionately that my mother will remain healthy and not be taken from me and my sister prematurely…days I worry what kind of world awaits my exquisite baby niece, still cloaked in her protective, unconditionally-loving innocence.
I could fall out of the sky. Something could fall out of the sky and land on top of me…or the people I know and love. The ripples of history, the here-and-now, the future…all converging like a canon shot to the heart.
Physical worry as metaphor. Leave it to me to analyse it to such a degree. Herman Melville would likely approve.
Tomorrow, I will probably wake up and wonder why I’m feeling so unsettled. I will make my bed, shave, and plunge head-long into another new day, a smile on my face. For now, I go back to the window, gaze at the darkness now blanketing the world…and contemplate some more…
