Reflections on Reflecting (final chapter)

            Sometimes reflections will come over me like an incoming tide, drowning out the safe beaches of my spirit, filling in the tide pools, bathing me in liquid memories. These have happened watching a sunset after a particularly delightful day, driving down a solitary, winding road with sun lighting up the morning dew, listening to a song that just seems to catch the moment, reflections that touch all five senses at once, reflections that explode in my consciousness.

            What causes some things to trigger these emotions? Perhaps, with music, a song that just happens to reflect a certain passing mood can allow me to dwell on that mood a bit longer, rather than have it pass, can make room for the next emotion. At times, “McArthur Park” touches something about lost love, or “Time Stand Still” by RUSH touches lost youth, lost friends, lost experiences. Sometimes the beauty of a painting or a sunset or a bird in flight will touch something so deep that there are no words to express it.

            In a world, a life, where everything changes from moment to moment, a flow that never looks back, a reflection can make something appear to freeze long enough to extract all the emotional beauty of the experience, all the wonder, all the longing for something permanent. These moments often bring tears of joy, tears for something that can’t be shared, and since they can’t, these are also tears of sadness, this wonderful mix of emotion, this feeling that everything that had been bottled up for weeks or years has suddenly come bubbling up. At times it feels like diving into a deep green pool, sinking quietly down, feeling the coolness, the fluidity, the raw sensation.

            These are feelings that touch basic humanity, beyond the compartmentalized feelings that accompany work, play, sex, whatever fits into the little boxes of our lives. These are the feelings that drive me to write, that make me want to explore the labyrinth of my life, my mind, my emotions. And like a labyrinth, there is no route, no exit sign, no map, just the washing over of raw and rich emotions, cathartic experiences, joyful experiences, even nostalgic experiences. Above all, it seems there are personal lessons to learn, to use to face life without regret, to find a moment of meaning in a world where all meaning is subjective, fleeting, convoluted and incomplete.

            In my opinion, we need these things, without which we are hardly more than robots, automated beings living automated lives, experiencing automated emotions. I recall watching a lingering sunset in northern Washington, realizing that the moment is everything, contains everything. I also recall that walk in the woods where everything from a bacteria to the godhead are all part of a cyclical flow, a flow where endings are also beginnings, where the solitary is also the universal, where everything is perfect, and only human drama makes it seem otherwise.

            Is it possible to live without these experiences?  I suspect that we can exist without them, but to fully live, we must experience the indefinable, the unfathomable, emotions without a cause, love without an object, joy without a reason.

            I had one of those reflections just a short while ago, going between home and some trivial destination, just a moment, but a moment priceless. I see now I can’t recall the substance of that reflection, but the emotions, the pause, the suspension of time, the deep sense that this moment is important, those things remain and will remain for perhaps life.

            I look out the window of my little writing space and see a puffy white cloud drifting over an intense blue sky, and it brings back memories of countless clouds drifting over countless blue skies, and all the experiences and emotions linked to those experiences. I can see that life isn’t just a chronology, a list of days and activities. Rather, it is a collage made up of random experiences, connected not by time but by feeling, by raw emotion, by the whims of memory. To reflect is to dream one’s life into being.