“I would prefer to be able to say: ‘I am satiated. What is given to taste in this life, I have tasted.’ But I am like someone in a window who draws aside a curtain to look at a feast he does not comprehend.”
Czeslaw Milosz
While going through boxes recently with old maps, postcards, love letters, and photographs, I was transported to the past, each object seemed to contain time, each object a signpost of my life. Closing my eyes I was suddenly in the Roman Colosseum, the largest amphitheater in the world. It was 1975 and I was about to be married to a struggling actor with three kids. Sitting on the perch of memory, I wondered who was I then? Was I a completely different person than I am now? Perhaps. Though recognizable to myself, I felt like a whole other lifetime had been lived by someone other than me. Who would I be now if I’d continued living that life?
Years later the doors of the train station opened on creaking hinges and I walked outside into the magic of Venice glowing with the translucence of the ocean. Time stopped and I enter another lifetime. If we are not defined by our past, what is the nature of our identity? If every experience I’ve had has contributed to who I am still becoming, how can I ever be my authentic self?
Fibonacci’s golden spiral composed by Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona. The cumulative map of my life is growing, its cartography woven with circular threads. If memory is the place where the past gathers, do we choose our memories selectively? If each new experience we have changes the way we see our past, would it have made any difference if I’d known then what I know now? Time is circular and ephemeral, swift and slow simultaneously. I lingered in Barcelona, hoping to heal some deep wounds, bringing light and forgiveness to the self I was, while reaping the benefits of healing in the here and now.
Vigeland Park, Norway, the largest sculpture park made by a single artist. No one could have ever told me I’d be visiting Oslo for the wedding of my adopted African son to his Norweigan bride. I was happy and having a lovely time. I remember I wanted the day to last forever, time to stand still. There was so much beauty to harvest. Does keeping this photograph justify my existence now? Would I exist now if not for the memory of who I was then? What a mystery life is!
I am fascinated by the existential questions about the nature of our reality. We are only permanently on the verge of the next moment, our futures have yet to arrive. As T.S. Eliot wrote, ” …and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.” I believe we are constantly coming full circle, and therefore we are always reinventing ourselves. We are a collection of all the people we have ever been.
