ELAYNE RIGGS: Living in the moment
John Lennon once observed, "Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans." And another John, ComicMix‘s own Mr. Ostrander, recently wrote here about a lesson learned (he calls it a "strange gift") in the wake of his wife’s death:
"One of the gifts I got was a deeper understanding of now. That’s what we have — now… now… now. This second. This second. This second. Now. We should never assume we get the next second. Kim realized, at the end, that she hadn’t done all the writing she wanted to do. That she could have done. She found ‘reasons’ but, at the end, none of them were more than excuses. Regret is what you have when you waste the now… Do you have something you want to write? Do it now. Is there something you want to do? Get started now. Is there someone you love? Love them now. It’s what we have; the next second is not promised to anyone."
It’s not right, it’s not fair, but sometimes grief has a way of clarifying ideas you’ve heard before so that you understand them in a new way. And "now" is one of them. I completely "get" this concept in the wake of my father’s death, in a way I didn’t even see it after my best friend Leah passed away. There’s no going back at this point. Leah and I were close for over a decade, but I’d known Dad my entire life. He was one of the two pillars on whom my existence rested for close to 50 years. And now that pillar is gone, and I feel like I’m going to be off-balance and teetering for the rest of my life.
The illusion that, if things got really hard, I could always regress to a time and place where I felt completely safe and protected, where I didn’t have to be a grown-up, is forever shattered. I’ve never been blessed with children, so I can’t even relive my childhood through the eyes of the next generation. I have to be the grown-up all the time now, caught between that which is no longer and that which will never be, while unforgiving time still insists on creeping along in only one direction. My world is nothing but "now"s.