Connections

It is a moment so rare and memorable when you are able to recall engaging in an activity without any awareness of previous backstory.  By backstory you mean some attitude, feeling, intention, or event going on in your life but not at the present moment in the foreground.

Even upon awakening in the morning, you are bringing along some baggage, some remnant of a dream clinging to you like a doorstep evangelist, some agenda influencing your immediate state of mind, some activity that awaits you and as a consequence causes you to sprinkle from the ketchup bottle of dread all over your attitude or some glorious anticipation, as pungent and beckoning as your first coffee of the day.

Trying to think of a recent moment that had not exchanged some molecules with a past activity produced no examples and left you in a funk.  Not for long--it is true, but funk nevertheless because it feels so good, so independent of mind and matter to be in place, on your own, in no way influenced by a recent phone call or having read something disturbing about the forthcoming election or recalling a necessary payment to be made or discovering a note reminding you of your promise to write something for someone, give some sort of a lecture for some reason, edit a manuscript for someone, etc ad inf.

Truth to tell, events began piling up on you to stay at about the time you achieved your majority, possibly even sooner, because as you recall, you were getting a bit frantic about what you believed the world expected of you and even more frantic at the discovery that the world was not concerned about your sorry ass nor was it even concerned about its own.  Even now, when you settle down to read a book or listen to music or pursue the vector line of a story roiling about your component parts, you are on some level aware of doing so at the expense of something else, a something else related to you managing to some degree the needs and responsibilities of which you are aware as a member of this society in which you live.  Even though you believe you will enjoy such a moment, you enjoy even taking such moments as though withdrawing them from a cosmic account.  Joyous as it is to read a book, it is even more joyous to read it instead of doing something else for someone else; exciting and uplifting as it is to listen to music, listening to it instead of doing something you feel obligated to to is making the experience even more acute and focused.

The good actor always knows what came before and what comes after.  You do not always know what comes next but there is that delicious sense of having just come from something and now there is this activity of this moment to engage.  You bring slipstreams of your movements through time and space, amazing yourself at times with the sheer enormity of the self-importance you have accorded yourself, causing you more than once to wonder if you need this inflated sense of valid purpose the way you sometimes feel the need for an afternoon cup of coffee.

It is good to be about, doing things for yourself and for others, splendid to be aware of others doing things for you or perhaps because of you.  These are all bits of tissue connecting you to the universe, to others, and of course to yourself.  The occasional moment of feeling adrift, unconnected, does not last long, perhaps about as long as the effects from a decent cup of coffee, prepared by yourself with known ingredients or prepared for you by someone you have a connection with.  Moments of feeling connected flash about like fireflies of a summer evening.  It is a comfort to watch them, to experience them; it is even more a significant comfort to offer them.