When we were kids, everyone knew who Nostradamus was. The great seer, the astrologer, the prophet who predicted major world events, according to his followers. I bet, today, if you asked twelve kids who Nostradamus was, you’d be a dozen short of finding an answer. No matter. Even his cult-ish followers seem to have faded away. Nonetheless, today is his birthday, having come into this world in the year 1503, and leaving again, 62 years later. I wonder if he saw that coming.
We don’t see things coming. Not me, at least. Probably not most thick humans. When it comes to knowing what is going to happen ahead, we have to wait around like everyone else. It is like a big crowd gathered at the Deli counter. “Take a number, please.” And then we stand around, waiting for our number to be called, anticipating the outcome, pastrami or liverwurst.
The upcoming. It could be anything, from the impending common cold, to the result of a basketball game. We simply have to wait, and see. As they say, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings. Well. They used to say that. Probably all those Nostradamus Groupies who slipped into obscurity along with their fat lady phrase.
When it comes to endings, or outcomes, we are at a bit of a disadvantage to the veils of the future. That is for sure. We all long for happy endings. We were primed for it, ever since our little lives began. Those adults, who we trusted so much for everything, would read the stories to us. And every one of them ended, “And they lived happily ever after.” So we were told.
Except for maybe Hansel and Gretel. I think their lives were forever diabolical, and corrupt. I mean, you stuff a witch in the oven and kill her. You just don’t “un-see” that when you are a kid.
Anyway. Orson Welles once said, “If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story.” This, coming from a guy whose most notable works were “Citizen Kane” and “War of the Worlds” — neither of which are terribly “rosy” at the ends. Unless you count the rose in Rosebud.
If we turn to the illustrious Neil Young on the subject, we might all remember that he so aptly crooned, “It is better to burn out, than to fade away.” I’ve sort of always disagreed with Neil on this one, as the “burn out” part could go a million different ways, most of them terribly wrong. I’m sure he probably meant it in the vein of Walden Pond, and feeling the need “to live deep and suck all the marrow of life.”
But again, I’m not real big on the marrow sucking. I’ve mellowed. I’ve seen the news clips of people falling to death in erupting volcanoes, or crashing their planes over the frozen tundras of Alaska. Personally, I think I’d rather fix a nice warm pot of hearty stew, hunker down with a book, and read, read, read all about it. My hip hurts, for crying out loud.
Even still, I tip my hat to the adventurers in life. Rock on, and all of that.
The older I get, the more I realize that the experience I have at hand — the one in any given moment — is the only one I have. And they are all filled with some sort of wonder. If we deem it “good” it is an asset. And if we see it as a “bad thing” it becomes a lesson. Either way. There it is.
What is most certain, about all of this, is the unknowing. That is what we do. We cannot predict. Or see. And even when we observe, we do well to see all the other questions swirling all around us. That Socrates had vision, when he said, “The more I learn, the less I realize I know.”
The large woman isn’t singing, and we continue to watch.
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“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
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“Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”
― Meister Eckhart
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“We’re all stories, in the end.”
― Steven Moffat
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