Tag: ideas

A Tale of Two Parts

Part the First

This is difficult for me to write. Yesterday, January 3rd, would have been my seventh wedding anniversary had I not been divorced. Unlike a spouse who died and is no longer upon the planet Earth, I am dealing with a different kind of loneliness. It is the loneliness of no longer being wanted. I know, approximately, where my ex-wife is, and approximately, what she is doing. And that hurts, because she isn’t here, and she isn’t with me. Once upon a fairy tale time, she was right by my side doing what I was doing, or I was by her side, doing what she was doing. We were together. But now she is beside someone else, and they are doing things together. And that hurts spectacularly.

I don’t know what the time period is supposed to be for getting over a spousal rejection, but I am apparently not there yet as I still memorialize a coupling that has uncoupled. I am sure I will get there at some point, but in the meantime, I am stumped by a simple question: now that she has moved on and put me behind her and someone else beside her, I am a free man. I am as if I was never married. That thought gives me some release, some comfort, but what do I do now to anchor that thought in reality? Do I burn all her love letters in a massive bonfire of dead desire? Do I delete all our pictures and digital memories as if scorching cyberspace? Do I forget her name and erase her influence from my life? Is such a thing even possible? I signed up for eternity. I was hers forever…until I wasn’t. I don’t know what to do.

Except, maybe I do know. I will do what I have done since the first noniversary rolled around: keep moving forward.

Part the Second

It is a brand new year, an entity I am calling twenty17. Thus far in my life I have mostly eschewed this whole idea of “New Year’s Resolutions” in which one is hereby resolved by the arbitrary Gregorian calendar to radically change one’s life in some way. It has seemed like so much hokum to think that just because some number has rolled over on a time keeping device, one is now able to change their life. In my nearly 30 years of experience, I haven’t seen that to be particularly possible. But here I am, about to resolve something on so public a forum as to not be ignored.

I resolve two things, first: to read more. I was a voracious reader in my youth. You would often find me curled up on the couch, or stretched out on a bed with book in hand, eagerly flipping pages, absorbing content like the proverbial sponge absorbs water. In the last few years, my reading has slackened pace to have almost stopped completely. The only reading ritual that continues is my annual reading of the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion. Even that reading has become less a pleasure and more a chore. But I want to regain the magic of reading, and that means actually reading again. Part and parcel with my goal of reading more is to actually find a local library and get a library card so that I might read to my heart’s contentment.

Secondly may it be resolved: to write more. I used to be a prolific writer, at least one who wrote semi often about current events or currently occurring thoughts. However, as can be seen from a perusal of the right hand column on this blog labeled “archives”, there is a gap from 2015 to 2017 in which I didn’t write anything. This I want to remedy. I won’t resolve to write every day, or even every week, but I do promise to write at least once a month. So far, I am doing spectacularly as this will be my second long form essay in this month alone. Go me!

Part the Epilogue

Hereby it can be seen that these two parts join together. In leaving behind one form of life, I pick up another, and move forward. And that perhaps is the answer. Hannah, I sincerely hope, will live a long and happy life, and thus we may even cross paths again in the future. The only way I live life with that knowledge and survive that eventuality with any semblance of me is to create a once and future life that is again mine own.

Excelsior!

Remember, Remember or What Guy Fawkes Day Means to Me

Today is the fifth of November, and you might hear, or see people on social media sites quoting from the film V for Vendetta or the graphic novel it was based on or the old traditional Guy Fawkes rhymes “remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot” and the history that it was based on.

That history is Guy Fawkes Day, which in short, is a commonwealth holiday that celebrates the failed plot to assassinate King James I in 1605 by one Guy Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot. Whatever the original reasons Fawkes and his cronies had for killing the English monarch, it is clear that his failed plot’s celebration means more to people today, and more to me, than just a failed murder.

I abhor violence, and don’t believe in death as a way to move a social agenda forward so I might be called a traditionalist when it comes to the celebration of a failed assassination. In fact, my introduction to the world of Guy Fawkes and the “fifth of November” cult that has grown up around him comes through the film V for Vendetta. In the film, a future Britain is controlled by a totalitarian regime that has become, or perhaps always was, evil and that government is taken down by a man in a Guy Fawkes-esque mask known only as V.

It is a wonderful film, and I suppose its primary message is “People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people” but I am no revolutionary, at least not one of swords and drums and guns. Indeed, if there is a quote from the film that sums me up, in so much as a film quote can, it is this one: “Ideas are bulletproof.”

The protagonist of the film, Evie Hammond, a small, frightened girl who becomes a patriot afire for the cause under the tutelage of V, says that one “cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it; ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love” and while all that certainly sounds true it isn’t quite accurate. Evie is speaking of the man behind the ideas, her Guy Fawkes that she loves, and how her love for him is more real to her than his ideas are and I think she misses the point of her own drama.

Ideas do not die. Ideas can change the world. All the women and men who have ever fought for an idea have died forgotten. We do not remember their names. We only remember why they fought, why they died. I know nothing about the real Guy Fawkes, all I know is his idea: that one could change the world through gunpowder, treason, and plot. And while he ultimately failed, people still believe that to this day. That idea is pervasive and powerful.

I believe that ideologies and ideas are more powerful than puny bombs and bullets. I believe that one day we will lay aside weapons of mass destruction as a means of advancing ideas and instead fight directly with words. Words cannot be stopped by force. Words endure the death of the speaker. Words shape ideas. Words are remembered.

That is what I do, each fifth of November: I remember. I remember the ideas that have come before me, that inspire me, that challenge me. I may not remember who first generated the idea, or why they died, but I do remember the words they used to articulate that idea. I remember the words they used to advance that idea.

And I try, just as they did, to articulate my own ideas with words. It is likely no one may remember me, but there is a chance they will remember my words, and my ideas. My ideas that love triumphs over hate, that prejudice and fear are transitory and that acceptance and unity will win the day. That reaching for something is just as important as grasping it. That moving forward will always trump moving backwards. That every inch is just as far as  a mile. That ideas are bulletproof.

So today, remember, remember the fifth of November and remember the ideas that created today, and generate some ideas that will create a better tomorrow.