As I re-hashed my life when I wrote my memoir, I was struck by how many events resembled incidents and situations that had happened years before. They were never the same, of course. I was older the second (even the third) time, and conditions were different; but in looking back, I could recognize many of the same choices, the same alternatives.
This suggested that the journey through life is as complex as listening to a musical fugue. In the fugue, a melody is repeated again and again but altered each time, with a different key or a new rhythm. The multiple variations at times become so complex that it is difficult to recognize the original theme.
For long periods of my life I would wake up in the morning and greet the dawn by saying “Another day — another chance to get it right.” It was as if each day gives a little more experience, so that the older person can face the same issues with more wisdom, more equanimity. In the Ground Hog Day image, we move toward the Buddhist state of Nirvana, a state of release with no more Karma to pay back.
Getting older, a person recognizes the passage of seasons with more wistfulness. Summer is not just time for another vacation, winter more than a time to dust off the snow shovel.
During the years when I lived in Ottawa, I noticed a marked change in the weather at the beginning of September. There was no mistaking the end of summer and the beginning of a long descent into extreme cold. There was a beauty and a sereniity associated with this change, of course: the pesky summer bugs disappeared, and the leaves on hardwood trees transmuted themselves into brilliant reds and oranges and yellows.
The signals may be different here in Kelowna, but they also show up at the beginning of September, even if only briefly. This past Tuesday, low clouds obscured the tops of the mountains that surround the Okanagan Valley. It was the first time I had seen that meteorological feature since last spring. During the winter it is constant, obscuring the valley with an atmospheric cocoon and insulating it against most of the harshness of winter.
There is a broken cloud deck today, with clumps of cumulus, some small ones, narrow, dense and dark, stretching across the sky, but there are also refreshing patches of blue in every direction. It is not yet time for the clouds to close the valley in. But nobody doubts that the heat of summer is mostly gone, and it is more than the absence of tourists that shows it.
In a way that Ralph Waldo Emerson was never able to do, Catherine has taught me to see natural facts as symbols of spiritual facts. If much of nature is cyclical, if the seasons come and go, if events in our lives repeat themselves, then any positives or negatives we perceive can also be shown to be mistaken in time.
The only things you can be sure of, I have heard, are death and taxes. In the many years when I paid no income taxes I managed to sidestep one side of that truism, but I have no illusions about the other side. I do not believe (as William Saroyan did) that an exception would be made in my case, and I am certainly not enough of a solipsist to believe that the world began when I was born and that it will end when I go. Rather, it becomes easier for me to see my own existence as part of an endless cavalcade of life. And I appreciate Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 more strongly than ever.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
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