Autumn in Edmonton

September 17th, 2005

Can you fall in love with a thought? Can a thought break your heart? I think you can. And I think it just did. And, you know, it’s not a bad way to be, really. Fall in love with the world. Let it break your heart. Fall in love with it again. Why not? What the hell else was I bank­ing on anyway?

Here I am, wan­der­ing around like a mad­man, eyes filled with the tragic beauty of autumn. Old things are dying to make way for the new. Whis­pers of win­ter float through the warm air. Soon enough it will just be too damn cold for any­thing to spark.

Nature bewitches me with its last cel­e­bra­tion before the big freeze. Sud­denly, there are all these bril­liant, earthy col­ors. While spring and sum­mer shine with the overt beauty of a Hol­ly­wood actress, all glossed up and per­fect for the big screen, autumn is that sweet girl next door who brings back your child­hood inno­cence — the one who makes you smile just think­ing about her. It’s real and gen­uine. The time slows and you savor the sim­plest moments. You find your­self wish­ing those moments could last forever.

I have no des­ti­na­tion today, but even a per­son with no des­ti­na­tion always finds him­self some­where. I won­der why it took me so long to be where I am right now?

There are oth­ers: sit­ting and writ­ing, some play­ing Fris­bee, some just pass­ing by. The air is elec­tric and I’m grin­ning ear to ear. I’m ready for a rev­o­lu­tion, and I’m nod­ding in agree­ment with every­thing around me.

These peo­ple. As I observe them, there’s that awful, hang­ing ques­tion: How many of them are observ­ing me? And how closely? To answer that, I guess I first have to answer an even more haunt­ing ques­tion: Who am I, really?

You see, some­where in here, there’s this per­son I call me, who’s made of some arbi­trary col­lec­tion of expe­ri­ences, rela­tion­ships, ideas, dreams, and biol­ogy. Some­thing beyond that me seems to be cre­at­ing a movie about life itself, about what it means, about how it’s beau­ti­ful or hor­ri­fy­ing or worth­while or not.

Who am I, really? Today, it almost seems like I am that movie direc­tor who is beyond me, but who is also within me. How can that be? And do I not also feel that I am the actor, the one who is being directed? What about the oth­ers? Are they actors or audi­ence? Or both?

Are they actors in my movie, or am I an actor in theirs?

This par­tic­u­lar movie screen is dif­fer­ent because it’s a two-way deal. The actors are also look­ing back out at the audi­ence, as if they don’t know they are the actors. I see now that we are one in the same, actors and audi­ence, and that we are all play­ing incred­i­bly com­plex and beau­ti­ful roles in this incred­i­bly com­plex and beau­ti­ful drama, called: “This is What Life’s All About!”

Even­tu­ally, I push myself to leave. I look back to where I was sit­ting moments ago and taste an over­whelm­ing melan­choly. Out­side of the moment, I now fully real­ize its wrench­ing beauty, and I won­der why I didn’t just stay there forever.

What is it that con­tin­u­ally pushes us out of Eden? Why are we always look­ing back­ward or for­ward? Why are we never just there?

Nos­tal­gia. Hold on to it, and you’re look­ing back five years from now, feel­ing the same regret about not enjoy­ing what you had because you were just too busy wish­ing it was another way.

The solu­tion sud­denly seems much too sim­ple: Let go.

Let life throw me about as it wills. Under­stand that I would not want it any other way. No effort. No strug­gle. Just a pro­found and pro­tect­ing peace, know­ing that I am exactly where I need to be and doing exactly what I need to do. I won­der why my life so far has been more of an exer­cise in com­plex­ity than simplicity.

But then, the sim­plest things can be incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult some­times, can’t they?

I wave good­bye and lose myself in a maze of side streets. There are these beau­ti­ful old houses, each one with its unique, mag­i­cal char­ac­ter, and I feel a bit like I did as a small child. Curios­ity. Won­der. Love. When exactly did I start to need more than that? I feel like skip­ping and twirling in spi­rals through the streets, like I would if I were an actor in a musi­cal, but an adult doesn’t do such silly things. There was a time for that and now it’s gone. That’s what it means to grow up, right? Appar­ently, as one gets older, the time is for any joy­less and need­less sac­ri­fice to mas­quer­ade itself as wisdom.

Time. I’m sud­denly not so sure there’s much sense in keep­ing track of it any more. Why count down the sec­onds towards an uncer­tain future? Why stare long­ingly into a fad­ing and fic­tional past? It’s a pretty mag­i­cal world out there — and things are chang­ing by the minute. Why not just flow with the Tao?

And so I come full cir­cle, back to the begin­ning of this strange day, inside a moment that is enough to jus­tify all of exis­tence. You see, in this par­tic­u­lar moment, I can’t help the feel­ing that I’m sit­ting in the very cen­ter of things — at the cen­ter of the magic the­ater. All of these sounds… all at once. I’m find­ing my zen in the splash of the leg­is­la­ture foun­tains, as would be the clas­sic image… but also in the rise and fall of engines as these big metal beasts race all around me on var­i­ous streets that sur­round this oasis of seren­ity. It all seems so dis­tant, yet so close. So familiar.

I watch a kid with his par­ents. The kid is rolling on the ground beside his dad. They look down, amused by their son’s choice of travel. He sim­ply refuses to walk. It’s more fun rolling, even if it is more dif­fi­cult to make turns that way.

Kids are pretty cool. I envy the joy­ous free­dom that I see, and I won­der again when exactly it was that I gave that free­dom up. I don’t even remem­ber putting up a fight.

But then, this has always been our jour­ney — the redis­cov­ery of what we’ve always known, the recov­ery of what we’ve always had.