Wind
There’s a story I got to experience once. A story that left me with an empty feeling. A story with a couple of curious things. The first curious thing is that the protagonist dies pretty early in the story - almost halfway through. And the thing about his death is that it isn’t the kind of death you expect of a protagonist. There is no showdown between him and the bad guys. There is no climactic scene. You don’t even get to see him die. You don’t get to say goodbye. He is just found dead. Shot. Dead, like everyone else in the story. And so the story goes on without him.
Another curious thing is the antagonist. Top of the list of odd things about him is that he carries with him a coin. A coin that he uses to decide whether to kill some of the innocent bystanders that cut across his path. He is a believer of chance, he says. And some of these innocent bystanders are in front of him by chance. And so he relegates their fate to chance. The coin decides, not him. That’s his moral code. But it’s the most innocent character in the story that finally breaks this moral code. He tosses the coin, and asks her to call it. She refuses to. ‘The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.’ In doing so, she places her fate squarely in his hands. And forces him to make a choice.
Another curious thing is in the sheriff that is a central character in the story. He is an old man, watching the events of a chaotic world. He is responsible for controlling this chaos, but he’s overmatched. He wishes he could go back to the old days, when it was simpler. Quieter. But his cousin, bound to a wheelchair because he was shot by an outlaw, is one of the few who remember the old days. And it is his cousin that reminds him of how their uncle died. Shot on his doorstep. Left lung bleeding out, as he tried to get to his shotgun. Those good old days never existed. This is how it’s always been.
But by far the most curious thing about this story, is that there is no music. None at all, for the entirety of the story. Lots of other stories need music to emphasize with the audience emotion, gravity, and importance. This story makes no use of it. The only thing consistent in this story, throughout all scenes, whether important or not, is the wind. It is always blowing. You always hear it in the background. Always. Life has no soundtrack.
Death
I was recently asked to talk about a man. A man who had lived for such a long time, it was incomprehensible to me. And because he had lived such a long life, I knew that nothing I said would be even close to accurate. One, because he had come up in a different time from me. And two because while I called this man family, I barely knew him. So I came up with a brief approximation of what I’d seen in him, trying to do him justice, but failing at it. And soon after, I watched as he was lowered down. I threw a handful of dirt at him at him to say goodbye. And later took a spade to assist in sending him back to the dust from which he came. I’ve been told that this is when it hits you. The finality of it. So through all this, I expected to feel something. But there wasn’t anything. And after all this, the only thing that went through my mind was, ‘ I guess that’s it. Hope it was all worth it, old man.’ I might have unknowingly expected it to be dramatic. Maybe I expected a soundtrack to tell me how to feel. But there was nothing. It was gentle. It was, for the most part, quiet. The man came. He lived for 86 years. And now he was gone.
Loss is the natural consequence of life, I hear. From the moment we are born, we are losing. We lose connections in our brains. We lose innocence as we grow up. The moment we become aware of people, we begin losing them too. Maybe it’s why we keep on reminiscing on the old days. Because the old days can be idealized. Because a lot of the things that we have lost now, still exist in those old days. But loss is the natural consequence of life. Everything breaks eventually. Entropy is the natural order. Everything decays.
Choice
For a lot of you reading this, it sounds nothing but depressing. ‘You sound like you’ve given up.’ ‘Why even try anymore.’ And that’s a good question. Why try? My answer? Well, because you can. And if you can, you should. I know, the older I get the more I sound Christian. So I’ll draw from the faith for this part. ‘So then, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out my mouth.’ That’s Revelations 3:16, one of the bible verses I keep coming back to. I think it has stuck with me because of the place I was at when I encountered it. Lost. Trying to figure out what to do with myself. This little passage seemed to signify to me that God insists on choice, whether it’s the correct one or not. The thing he despises more than a bad choice is indecision. Maybe that’s why his interactions with lucifer don’t carry contempt, or hatred. But some sort of competition. Competition carries with it some kind of respect.
There is another line I came across a while back. ‘The man who hesitates, who does nothing, who buries his talent in the earth, with him, Jesus can do nothing.’
So find meaning, whether it is through your faith, your work, your children or your hobbies. Find what makes your heart light up. What drives you past your own limits. It will give you the fuel to go on. The people who stand on the ledge, time and again, are people who have lost their sense of meaning. Do not let yourself get to that point. But at the same time, do not let it consume you. Because what gives you meaning can also be a curse, where you are nothing without it. We seem to glorify ambition quite a lot. But ambition has its costs. What’s a good way to prevent meaning from turning to a curse?
Shadows
There’s another story I love, this one more subdued than the one at the start. In this one, we follow another old man as he goes through his perfect day. A day that involves reading, taking care of himself and his trees, listening to music while going to work, work itself, and dreaming. We see him doing this again, and again, and again, with brief and random events happening here and there. It’s what we today would consider a mundane life. Especially in this age where the mundane has been vilified. But he seems to be content. Not happy - ‘happy’ is a slippery slope, and in my opinion, an ugly word. Content. That’s what he is. And you can see it in his eyes. You see it when he smiles. A smile that seems to come from his soul. A smile that looks vulnerable, and because of this vulnerability, seems almost sad to us. An un-performative smile. And it’s just not his smile that’s vulnerable. It’s his discomfort too. You see it when he’s forcing himself into the backseat of a truck. He doesn’t try to make it look gracious. Because it’s not. It’s his pain, when he gets a visit from his sister. And it’s his gentle anger, when he confronts his boss calmly but firmly about overworking him.
But peppered throughout all of these activities are shots of him, time and again, stopping to look up at the trees, and the down at the shadows of leaves dancing to the wind. Shots of him noticing the world around him. And every time he does, that smile comes back. Maybe that’s the cure to the curse of ambition. Noticing. So I ask you again, when was the last time you stopped to look at the shadows of leaves, dancing like waves of water? When was the last time you looked up at the stars? It’s a meaningless act, yes. But an important one all the same.