Lost in Transition

It's been a journey; I would guess that all people would say it and even as I begin to put metaphorical ink to paper (because that doesn't really happen anymore) it feels like the middle of a journey rather than the end.

I've been putting thoughts down for a few years on this blog, in the Lutheran magazine for bits and pieces of newspapers in small towns here and there, but this is the first really coordinated attempt to organize my headspace when it comes to how the Bible impacts my journey and how it helps me to reflect on where I've been.  So, for a while, I'll put a few excerpts in to see if some of these things should be published.

I suppose doing this is like introducing a freshly baptized baby to the church.  As Australians say:

It's all good.

 

 

Lost in Transition

 

Chapter 1.

Looking Back

 

 

It was obvious, even to the casual observer, that the man was caught somewhere in the past.  His eyes stared into an empty space somewhere on the horizon as his hand ran across the rusty object in from of him.  I’d been watching him for a while, not specifically spying, but interested in what I interpreted as his pensive thought process.  As I circled the track, headphones in my ears, listening to the newest sounds of emotional anxiety from today’s music culture, I focused on him for a quarter of a lap each time.

He didn’t make much progress.  For minutes at a time, the man would lovingly, if you could call it that, allow the object in front of him to transport him to a few decades past.  Most assuredly, he had been a farmer because each of the rusted objects in front of him bespoke of an era of agriculture age.  The last object in front of which he stopped was an old chisel plow.  He picked at the flaking brown and red rust encasing iron.  Time seems to do that to everything:  well, time, air and water.  They change everything.

As he picked at the plow, the inner conflict was like a battlefield.  His heart fought for the memories that brought him so much contentedness while his body feinted and thrust against the inevitability of the reality that is encroaching age.  Oh, to be young again.  To feel the wind in my hair as I sat on the tractor that pulled this plow.  To smell the earth turned once again offering a fragrance of the inevitability of new life.  To see with sharp eyes my wife and children working alongside me, to hear their laughter, their cries, the simplicity of life that seems to be squashed by each successive year.  How I wish to be back there again.  How I wish…

As I watched the man, his whole demeanor was encased in recapturing something lost in the transition from youth to adulthood to old age.  He moved to the next farm implement, his green collared shirt billowing over his o-so-short-shorts.  Even his wardrobe told me that his best years were in the 1980’s.  He wore thongs and a well-worn hat that had seen a thousand days in the baking Australia sun.  He was every man or every woman who has ever reached the subjective identity of old age.  His transition is the same journey that all people long to have and yet with each transition, each movement to something new, each growth area, there is a sense of loss that settles like a layer of dust over the soul. 

It is something we all deal with in our search for happiness and contentedness.  How do we deal with the next step of life? How do we cope with all that seems to be lost in transition?

 

In our fifteen years of marriage, Christine and I have moved houses fifteen times.  Like most of the gen Xers or those born later, a constancy in change becomes part of our existence.  We revel in the fact that this year is not like the last; the space we previously occupied retains memories, but the current location is preferable in its presentness.  Before each one of the moves, we have tended to minimalize our domestic footprint:  We hold garage sales so that we won’t have to cart all thirty-three thousand cartons of goods (or bads depending on what we’re carting) that we’ve collected over the years to shift to the next garage.  With each successive move and corresponding garage sale, it has been interesting to watch which things we keep and how we decide what is important for retaining.

Christine is hesitant to throw out anything that has memories attached to it (which is pretty normal) but the older it is, the more it has attached itself to our collective married soul.  And, if we were to even think about setting it out on the cracked pavement of the driveway, it would be painful – very painful.