On Growing Up (that haze of sunshine & dust)

Growing up, and the art of doing nothing. How I wish I was again sure of the former and a master of the latter. Because I’ve lived years, often without experiencing anything new, and fill my time - and myself - so much that there is no place left to give wings to my choices or desires.   I still remember the days when I naturally knew what was important -  reading, and thinking about what I  read; talking, and then letting long silences puncture my words; of waking up, and watching a random tree outside my window sway; of sitting at the dining table, of mum waxing eloquent about a new technique of soil petrification, and dad taking a spoonful and saying “This is good”, and a silence descending, punctured only by the sounds of blissful chewing. The choices were simpler, and unbeknownst to us, we were creating nooks for return, for solace.   In our tumbling, involved worlds now, we are heroes of the rote, progenitors of the already parsed, masters of the cliched, slaves to the routine. We don’t change rhythms, we don’t stop on the way to the office, we have an iron grip on whom we meet, we are shy for the new, we are afraid of the unobvious. In the immensity of possibilities, we pick a few strands and tie our world with them - and think it’s gift-wrapped.   A friend wrote in, when a poem from 9 years back popped up on her Facebook feed - “I miss those times of poetry, conversations, simplicity.” A flood of pleasure ran through me just thinking of those days. It’s easy to say that we’d moved on (the truth), it’s useless to say “let’s return” because we can’t. Every time is a different time, and we are in many ways different people - what connected us then was that magical alchemy of time which presented us with the plain brass of time which we turned into pure gold. Nothing can bring back that transition - yes, because it was that - as the rabbit hole of life is always destined to take us somewhere else.   Nostalgia is a bitch, but it serves a purpose. It reminds us that what is valuable to our memory is because tha