Seed: "I am," I cried.
For the last few weeks my youngest has been struggling with some big questions. One night we were going through the bedtime routine. She was just out of the bath, scrubbed clean, and tucked in with still-damp hair moistening the pillow underneath. We sang a couple of old Hoagy Carmichael songs and I lay there a few minutes waiting for her to nod off. I was actually the one to drop off. But after about ten minutes in the pitch black, I hear, “Dad?”
“Yeah, Killer.”
“Isn’t it weird that we’re here?”
“Whaddaya mean weird? And whaddaya mean ‘here’?”
“I mean…just…that we…people…are…just…that they…exist.”
All of a sudden the grogginess of REM sleep washed away. How was I supposed to handle this? This one wasn’t in the parenting manual. I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I wanted to handle it right. On the one hand, I didn’t want to just blow off the question because, well, it is THE question, isn’t it? On the other hand, I didn’t want to answer it too much because I didn’t want to give her the impression that there are any answers. But then on another hand (we’re Hindus) I started to worry that if I didn’t offer her any guidance she might develop some warped ideas and grow up to start some new religion. Even worse, I was afraid her overactive brain would run away with the thoughts and she might develop some anxiety or as they say in the trade, existential dread. On still another hand, I wanted her to have the scary euphoria of epiphany and all those other Greek words.
I eventually got her mind to stop racing enough to go to sleep, but then I started trying to reconstruct my own dawning. It didn’t take me long to remember because it is indelibly marked in my memory. I was six and I had just gotten home from kindergarten. My mom always made me take a nap after school (given the kind of kid I was, it was probably more for her sanity than my health) and so there I was lying in my little bed in my little room. The window was opposite me and it had that kind of ambient afternoon glow around the drawn drapes.
The rules were that I didn’t have to go to sleep but I had to stay in bed. No books, no toys. If I made it an hour, I could get up. That day the house was hushed. It was one of those times when you hear a hum or a rushing sound and you realize you’re hearing the silence. Then I heard an airplane flying overhead. I’d heard airplanes before, but on this day I wondered, Who was on that plane? How many were on it? Where were they going? How many planes are in the air at one time and where are they going? Before I could turn my brain off I had projected that single noise out to wondering how many planets had people on them and ultimately whether God existed. My mom carried the day, though. Not long after I had accepted the immensity of the universe and that I exist in it in a very small way, the smell of fresh-baked cookies wafted into the room and her smiling face peered through the door, "Cartoons are on. Time to get up!"
I’m still amazed that I remember that episode so vividly. In fact, it’s my most vivid memory. I’ve talked to the wife about it and she said she can remember her epiphany of self-awareness very clearly as well (there’s probably a good Greek or German word for this; I’m sure Bunky knows it). The funny thing is that when it happens you don’t mark it in your memory as the moment you became self-aware, but years later you recognize it as such.
By way of an update, since that night Killer will blurt out these heavy questions like, “What if God isn’t real?” “If you died before I was born, would I still be born?” The wife is worried she’ll develop anxiety issues, but I think it’s pretty cool to watch.
So, where were you when the lights came on?
posted by St. Fiacre @ 9:45 PM,
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Response: Weird to be you and me
Lying on my back, I watched the clouds pass overhead. It was 1970. I was 6 years old. Oblivious to the deeply philosophical ramifications of what I was about to do, I wondered what was at the edge of those clouds. I knew about the planets. (Although I think Pluto might have been called Planet X then. I just don't know.) But my mind rushed out past the planets. What was beyond them? What was beyond what was beyond them?
I started hyperventilating. Was being in the universe like being in a box? No matter how big a box, there was always something outside the box. Was there another universe outside our universe? I was freaking myself out.
Rolling back onto my stomach, I stared down through the lawn at a bug, trying to think about something else. Another weird thought popped into my head. What if my mother had not married my father? I wouldn't be me! Well, I'd be only half me, but not the me I was at that moment. If it had happened that way, if my parents had married other people, would I as the child of one half of that equation run into the child of the other half of that equation and recognize the part of myself that might have been?
Palms sweating, I sat up and tried to calm down. It's weird to be me, I thought.
This had to be my moment of self-awareness. And, like the Saint, I can remember it in vivid detail. The clouds are still as fluffy, the grass still as scratchy, the bug still as crawly. Periodically, more perplexing and befuddling questions came to mind. But I never talked to my parents about it. I kept it to myself. I already had a reputation as being strange; there was no need to underscore my oddities.
Not long ago, Sport went through the same thing, but instead of keeping it in, he vocalized it.
"Mom, isn't it weird being yourself?"
I knew exactly what he meant. I was thrilled to recognize in him my 6-year-old self. We had a good talk about just how weird it was. I don't think I did or said anything that might have pointed him toward warped ideas or a bizarre religious cult.
Although, if anyone was to be lured away by giddy, tamborine-playing cult members, it would probably be him. And the cult probably would be headed up by Killer.
Labels: self-realization, weirdness
posted by Adjective Queen @ 9:44 PM,
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Response: Existence is Futile
Actually Saint, I would point you in the direction of the Swahili word for self-awareness, "ufanyaji" (pronounced ooh-fawn-ya-gee), which funnily enough is now associated with a popular Tanzanian fruit drink. However, the word itself has much more sinister origins. According to Daniel Juergen's landmark 1976 treatise, Swahili: Deconstructing the History and Language of an African People, 700-1600, the term "ufanyaji" first appeared in the log books of Portugese slave traders around the turn of the 15th century. It could often be found scrawled on the walls of the stowage deck. But that's for another blog. And it's a complete lie.
My Own Private Idaho occurred in a much more recent time and place. In 1986, I was five years old. My favorite baseball team at the time was the California Angels, I wore an oversize Panama hat from the Bahamas everywhere I went, and I still, on occasion, wet the bed. That spring, my parents took me on my first snow-ski outing in Angel Fire, New Mexico. The entire week had been going swimmingly until suddenly, out of nowhere, smack dab in the middle of my mom's Famous Homemade Chili dinner, I realized that someday I would die. You would think I would have already learned that at such a relatively late stage. But no, it seems my brain cells were too clogged with GI Joe trivia and glue shrapnel. Up until that point, the worst news I had ever received was the diagnosis that my poodle had Irritable Bowel Syndrome. But I can't even begin to tell you the sheer horror of realizing I would not, in the words of Liam Gallagher, live forever. I cried for at least an hour, hurled obscenities at my parents when they tried to comfort me, and sank into a pit of self-loathing from which I thought I would never recover. I have since tried to replay that day over and over in my head, in the hopes of finding concrete evidence that I had in fact had a near death experience of some sort. Perhaps a terrible fall on the Bunny Slopes or a mild case of hypothermia induced me to reflect on the very thing I had been avoiding up to that point? But here we are 21 years later, and I still have no clue as to what prompted such a terrible and enduring moment of what I like to call "self-bewareness." In my most sobering moments though, I can trace back all of my life disappointments to that very day. Even now, when I eat chili, I ponder the fragility of human existence.
I am a person who worries almost constantly. But at the the root of every single one of my worries is that I will die. I mean really, if you reason out all of your own personal anxieties, you have to figure that at the core of each, is this constant fear of death. And there's no getting around it. You could be worried about giving a presentation in a room full of your peers, but really you're worried that you will "die of embarrassment." You could be worried that your family and friends will discover some awful secret about you, but really you're worried that you "die of shame." You could be worried about a serial killer living in your neighborhood, but really you're worried that you will, well, die of death. So faced with such constant trepidation, it's no wonder people resort to Owen Wilsonesque extremes. But you do have to keep it in perspective. With every year that goes by, I find myself thinking less and less about the Big D. Strange, isn't it? You would think the opposite would be true. However, the Ingmar Bergman Seventh Seal styled Grim Reaper of my youth has transformed himself into the affable Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey version. Most excellent huh?
I hope that the Super Giant Killer, like myself, and the Queen and the Saint before her, will take such monumental discoveries in stride. Life's too short to dwell too much on the infinite. Because, let's face it; we're never going to figure out why we're here, where we're going, or where we came from. And even if you could know, would you really want to? Well, I would, but only because I'm tired of worrying about it.
posted by A Contemporary Bunkshooter @ 9:43 PM,
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