The Future

I'm having a whale of a time!

Recently I was talking with my spiritual advisor. She goes by the name of Bethany and is one of my best friends, but her thoughtfulness and morality are so deeply, richly, arrestingly developed that I find myself going to her for advice more than anyone else. We tend to have these meandering philosophical talks, because her brain demands to be at all times challenging and unraveling, marveling, wondering. I love her so much it makes me cry. 

ANYway, we were talking about one of the many differences between she and I. She is, and has always been, a person who thinks chiefly about the future. About what she wants, and about the steps it will take her to get there. Both her sister (whom she tells me I remind her of in many ways) and I are people who dwell constantly in the past, romanticizing, longing, incarcerated by our reveries. Having met her sister only once, I can only take Bethany's word for it, but speaking for myself, I get the notion that this tendency can, in the wrong hands (mine) have ruinous effects on one's life. 

My compulsion towards nostalgia and sentimentality is nearly pathological. I have found myself using every possible excuse, both in these digitized pages and elsewhere, to see markers of things past, anniversaries of this or that, "one year ago today" type shit, and subsequently flinging myself down the rabbit hole of memories, rhapsodizing in word and thought all that's happened in some slightly more perfect past. If someone were to ask me what my one year, my five year plan was (and oh they have. They HAVE) my body would seize up, my brain would get all swimmy and squirrelly, I'd develop a stutter and then like a cat chasing its own tale, I'd collapse in a sweaty heap on the floor, exhausted by the mental calisthenics. 

Not to say that this is the root of my problem, but .... THIS IS THE ROOT OF MY PROBLEM. They say that if you can visualize the things you want (by they I mean Oprah and her retinue of self-actualizers, no shade), you can call them into being. But I think this may only work, if it works at all, when applied to things that haven't happened yet. I can't MAKE myself 25 again just by sheer force of will. In spite of myself, I've never really been able to SEE a perfect future, or even snapshots of one. They spin out like satellites, self-contained and disparate possible lives, and they bob closer and further depending on my own internal gravity that day, so that it changes from literal second to second. It's exhausting. So much easier to just think about that winter in 2005 when I had bronchitis and was dating a British drummer and accidentally OD'd on bourbon and pills and woke up naked on my kitchen floor with a piece of chewed gum next to my cheek. Memories, amirite? 

Sometimes I wonder if people who make wine must by their nature be sentimentalists -- one of my happier memories from Italy was walking through the cellar at Fontereza, gazing at barrels dated from years prior, and thinking it must be impossible not to place oneself contextually in each and every vintage -- not to think back to a particular bottling and remember "oh this was the year we had that drought and my husband left me and my dog died," or what have you. To have tangible evidence all around of one's past would be like being a recovering addict surrounded by little baggies of white stuff. Too tempting not to get carried away. 

This time last year ..... well, I was in Italy. And while I'm trying consciously NOT to dwell in the past as an experiment, it helps that that whole experience was so heartbreakingly disappointing that it's not terribly hard for me to avoid sentimentalizing it. There are things that happened much more recently that I have a harder time getting out of my brain. For example the most recent trip to New York which made me realize just how much people and things have propelled themselves forward -- into new lives, new jobs, new relationships -- while I teeter on the edge of some eroded shore, peering into the bottomless depths, trying to see the shape of the life I used to have there, not noticing the big-ass whale about to swallow me whole.


But what a way to go. 

All the Buddha people say to BE HERE NOW, which is a trick in and of itself. Here is the frosty arctic snow globe that is Vermont, where we have been pummeled by many many inches of snow and many many days of subzero temperatures. My chief job on these days has been to feed and water the beasts in a strategic way so that they can keep themselves warm enough to survive the gelid conditions. Loading them up with hay, feeding out warm molasses water to the ones who are especially hunched or shivering, and doing all this in several feet of snow by oneself, taking care to keep observing all possible anomalies, weird behaviors, skin markings, limps, is taxing in its own right. There's so much pressure when there isn't anyone else to share the burden. What if something goes wrong? What if someone gets sick? For better or worse, it is a taste of the thing I think I want for my future. A herd of my very own. 

Not to dwell in the past, but the other day I was thinking to myself, as I often do when I"m not amongst them (and nearly always when I am) how much I love goats. A few minutes later I thought about how much I love food. And it occurred to me that maybe I'm in the right line of work for these twin loves. 

It's good to take stock. Because the particles that make up who we are at this moment are accumulated, earned, compiled from our experiences leading up to right this fucking second. Speaking scientifically of course. But my project for this year is to look more forward than back, to try and harness what little spark of productive creativity I may have (winter is ROUGH) to imagine a future I want to clamber toward. We'll see how that goes. 

Facebook TimeHop needs to cut it out, though.

In other words, Happy New Year I guess?