I have known sin. Hurt that we give each other seems a part of life, conflicting wants meeting constrained resources. But hurting born of weakness, of the easy path, of avoiding conflict, that's unnecessary; that's sin. Because I was short-sighted, because I couldn't see the future & couldn't plan for what might be, because I was callow & shallow, because I was weak, I sinned against Karen, against others also but especially against Karen. And in the fullness of my time, those hurts have come back to haunt me. The 1978 "Driver's Seat" by Sniff 'n' the Tears -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V88yyayq6AY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SCzVEUlqqA, or the incomparable https://vimeo.com/13646998 (I love the red-rock majesty of the Desert SW, so thanks Mario Richard, & RIP) -- helps me look down a fifty-year-long tunnel:
...Jenny was sweetShow a smile for the people she needsI'm trouble, let's driveI don't know the way you came aliveNews is blue (the news is blue)Has its own way to get to youWhat can I do (what can I do)When I remember my time with you...
Be Here Now -- where else can one be? But I have to strive for this obvious wisdom (& have to make a conscious choice to be happy); my bias is to Be There Then, either dreaming about a future that inevitably depends upon the actions of chance or others (but never mine), or remembering the distant past, mourning on The Road Not Taken. I'm interpreting my situation as self-PWND; my sense of duty has become much stronger than I would have anticipated decades ago, and prevents me.... I've lately become enamored with the recent works of author Blake Crouch; his novels Dark Matter and Recursion both deal with The Road Not Taken, respectively as quantum-mechanical (the many-worlds interpretation) and neurological.
I tell myself that if I could go back..., I would not make my mistakes of sin with Karen, but would certainly make different mistakes elsewhere. I would have shaped a future that I chose, with a child and a planned career. Perhaps I wouldn't have panicked, and acted bewildering mal-adaptively, when presented with a road into science, a challenge; perhaps I'd have been a scientist if I'd only been more mature. And perhaps I'd have been with Karen for a time. The Road Not Taken is for us the one Un-seen as well.
In The Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna:
sri-bhagavan uvacabahuni me vyatitanijanmani tava carjunatany aham veda sarvanina tvam vettha parantapa
Ken Grimwood's Replay gives my favorite translation:
You and I, Arjuna, have lived many livesI remember them allYou do not remember
Presuming that we return again and again until we've achieved the enlightenment to Exit The Wheel, there seems little hope for me. Not only do I not Remember, I'm hazy on what I had for breakfast yesterday. But the long-term memory of the elderly comes back in strength; now that there's a lot more past behind than future ahead, half-a-century-old errors have come to frame my thoughts, to grace my life.
So what's the point of all this nostalgic wallowing? You'll remember or see the subtitle of my blog, "You learn from experience, yours or someone else's. And since there's not enough time to make all of the mistakes yourself....". Because I made these my mistakes, I expect you the reader to learn from them, to make different, perhaps "better" mistakes. To err is definitely human, but so is to learn.
And that's the point. This may (or may not) be the last entry to my blog -- that's why it's become important for me to address the "Karen" that haunts me -- I'm getting old, and planning on how to spend what time I have left (and In The Time of Plague, that time may be savagely truncated). You reading this are getting old(er) too. How are you going to spend the years you have remaining? So plan ahead, and make good decisions. If you do that, you'll have grown beyond me; my joy will be ineffable.
P.S. What brought this monologue to life now..., was that I "saw" Karen in contemporary video, well, close enough (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsMQmmBRgAI 0m28s is not as good as the two listings below, but it's free...). Perhaps I'll fly again one day, and thus watch air crash investigations with the high-minded philosophy that I'll learn from others' mistakes, and not make those same ones myself; VFR-into-IMC, getthereitis / mission mindset, confirmation bias, you can learn a lot from Youtube & DVR-on-cable-TV. So I discovered that the Smithsonian Channel's "Air Disasters" S11E2 "Killer Attitude" (summarized in the central third of S14E2 "Fatal Friction") has a support actress for the NTSB investigation who looks exactly like Karen did around 1970. Seeing a few frames awoke the pleasure of memory then the pain of loss, just like that.
ADDENDUM, (20200526 -->) 20230719T09-07:
I just finished reading "How It Unfolds (The Far Reaches collection)" by James S.A. Corey (the same authors Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck created "The Expanse" series of novels, but this isn't from that future), and continued thinking about Roy & Anjula. That fictional couple created a marriage that fell apart, then they repeatedly met across untold time and space, thousands upon thousands of reconnections of different people who were themselves yet not. And they all Moved On; I'm going to extract the key dialog at the end, that says it best for me, that speaks to my heart:
"I wasn't sure it'd play out. I figured ifyou shot me down there, this way there'dbe other chances. A thousand new worlds,and each one the chance to maybe get itright between us.""We canlive a billion different ways from here, butthere's only one path behind us. that wasnever going to change.""Well, we were good when we were good.""And when we weren't anymore, westopped. That's worth more than you giveit credit for. It's possible to be faithfulto something that's in the past. It's nota betrayal to build something new whensomething old is finished.""Honor the past without living in it.""I wanted to getit right between us. And I think this meansthat I did."
I'm coming to realize that I might "never" (a short-term thing, given my age) Move On, that my last thoughts will probably be of the Karen that was once mine. And that's not a bad thing; some of our time together was indeed very good. I can admit my mistakes, mis-direct their hurts past me, and finally remember the good that once was, the way we were in the youth of our lives.
