My First Christmas


Dear Eugene,

Last year around this time did you plan to have a last Christmas?  Even if you were to know would you have had your last Christmas any differently?

If everything's been well, no one would plan to change, even if one knows a change is overdue.  Yet it is a sad thing though, isn't it, to look ahead and see the next Wednesday as a repeat of today?  We make it sound like there is some good in staying put, stability and control, but how far can we wish to extend our streak of inertia before our life is set in stone for good?  We must look at the stone with serious intention and articulate what is so good about it.

I do know one thing good, maybe two.  It gives us a capacity to give, when we know what to expect about our own life, a sort of freedom to set others free.  But free like what?  Free like us.  So if this first good is true, then we must be honest and confront our own unfreedom.  It's probably a good idea to not feed others what causes in us indigestion, or worse, slow death.

And then there's also this good to not get confused.  Life is confusing, very complicated.  You think you are doing well and did try your best, then all of a sudden after a dinner conversation you realized you've been living it all wrong.  Or you've been giving your honest best in shapes and forms you could manage, then dawns a morning of rude awakening that twists things out of shape and un-creates them into formless void.  So to live like a stone is to let things fall on me but slide away like raindrops.  It doesn't matter if it's acid rain because I frankly don't know or care about chemistry.  There might be all sorts of cancer growing in me as I speak, but I am stone-cold to the possibilities, keeping calm and typing on.  I do expect to rise tomorrow and write another piece along the line of this one.

I am 43.  What am I missing?  In a way nothing.  I haven't lost enough to know what I would truly miss.  I haven't gained what is truly important in life to know what missing means.  Slip sliding away, my life, and I go along with that motion and let it be.  This is not a "mid-life crisis"; I had that already before 20.  This is about a call to start living, for once, for the first time.  Like a first Christmas, made possible by the first Christmas.

Yours, Alex

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