Sunset. The Sun’s setting out my window. Earth is rotating.
The transience of the sunset in the illusion. There’s an eternal circle painted
around the Earth, and our part just happens to be passing through it.
The equinox was a week ago. The days are shorter than the
nights now, but not really perceptibly so. The trees know, though. They’re
giving up their chlorophyll. The green ebbs away, and the leaves blush red and
gold.
Leaves, Sun, pine needles, birds, and above it all a clean
blue and white sky. You can focus on these aspects and almost imagine nothing’s
changed at all since the glaciers retreated all those turns of the Earth ago.
Then you see the black of the pavement, the dirty scaly shapes of the roofs of
the houses, the sprinkle-shiny reflections off the polished cars.
What do I feel looking at this scene? Is it ordinary or
transcendent? My impulse is to call it both, simultaneously. Is that profound,
or just another banality? I feel like I’m invoking something deep, drawing
inward at the quantum nature of the dust that composes this universe, but maybe
I’m just being wishy-washy, sitting on the fence, failing to make a commitment.
The middle child again would rather sit out and mediate than take a stand on
something.
Impulses. Simultaneity. Everything exists at once, like
Warren Zevon said. Except not everything actually does exist. There’s the
version of me, in this universe, born with this DNA, and the me now who’s
descended from that zygote. There may be other versions. There may be infinite
other versions, in an infinity of multiverse. But what to say of them? What if
the answer to all the profound questions is so what?
Then I remember my child’s face, wet, specked with blood, his
face touching oxygen for the first time. What was that? Was that profound or
banal? It’s happened to a hundred billion other people over all these years. So
if it happens a lot is it not profound? Then again my life, and the life of my
wife, turned about this moment. Like a gravity turn, we went in one way, went
out, accelerated another. Maybe every moment is like this, banal and profound
all at once.
I hope some day I sound less like a freshman philosophy student.
But I think I'm not that bad. I’m learning. It takes time, but I’m learning how to parse
these moments in my life.
