Poetry: #58 Growing Older (The Search For 6)
And my thoughts after revisiting the words
Growing Older
The desperate despair I have felt for so many years has crumbled in upon itself. I am no longer a whisper of my former self… Yet, here I sit, watching as I rip apart my life in subtle self-destruction No one here to hear my hurting howls or help with my ability to function All I ask is for a simple word, a phrase oft spoken to others… Won’t you please help me become a lover? The older I grow the more I wish I was younger. That is not abnormal but the thoughts swishing back and forth in my liquored head believe otherwise. I should be stronger. I should, in my decades of knowledge, be wise. Yet, here I sit… Why is this so hard, so difficult to describe whereas before it was like an autumn’s breeze? Why now do I feel as forlorn as an elm in the dead of winter? All alone and bare and broken by storms across the time that stretches on until it ends… Where do I end? What purpose does aging grant me that time itself will not take away? Does time give meaning or does time end all of significance? What would it say if given the chance? Ah, I’m rambling again.
What are your thoughts on this poem?
My Thoughts & Takeaway
This poem is curious to me. I wrote this when I was 23 and felt like I had lived a lifetime. Five going on six years later I could say I’ve lived another lifetime by such a measure but it wouldn’t be true. There is a search for something greater in these texts, something that was a spark which drove me in earlier years. Whatever it was, it has yet to return and still I write. I will not say my poetry in the last few years surpasses that of before, but the vocabulary certainly has.
This poem about growing older is about searching for that spark of my youth, “the light in my eyes” that had gone as one of the people from high school once said. It is a self-reflection that adds to the other poems in this timeframe as I slowly start to write again. First poetry, then prose. I could see what I was doing and that my life was stagnant, even with all the professional boons I had been receiving. It was giving me time to think, mostly, that helped me work through the stagnation and pursue higher aims. Sometimes, simply thinking about a thing for an amount of time can change everything.
Through all this pondering, “why now do I feel like as forlorn as an elm in the dead of winter?” is a line that is ever-present in my mind these days, especially post 2020. There is so much going on in the world, so much going on in the everyday lives of all people, that it is hard to stop and watch for a time without coming to the realization that we may very well all feel alone in some sense. I have always taken the harder path in life, always found time to think and play devil’s advocate, and that has not helped me gain friends. It has turned people sour, because they are too busy to frustrate themselves with what they may not want to hear, what they might disagree with, or what might undermine some pillar of their beliefs.
I will never forget the words of one of my ex’s that I will talk about later this year in depth. When I asked her about why she was depressed, she responded with “You made me think about things.” The implication in content (for I have to paraphrase from here) is along the lines of “you made me think about things I thought I knew and understood, and I thought about myself and what I am.” It is hard to hear such words and stand up for the deep thought that one might believe in, for I did and still do believe that thinking, deep thinking and meditation, can help reconcile one with who they are, the world they live in, and where they are headed. Only through this understanding, the reconciliation, can they truly chart a path that will make them happy. All I could think of was the idea that if she had to go her own way because I showed her how to ponder, wonder, think as deeply as one can imagine, then maybe the entire adult life I was building was wrong.
“Does time give meaning or does time end all of significance?” This is a line that occurs to me to have more than one meaning. Yes, there is the questioning of whether the inexorable march of time is what gives life meaning or takes it away, but there is another part of the question that must be asked: “Does taking time to think give life more meaning or take away all you have, love, and believe is possible? Does it take away their meaning? Their significance?” While I end this poem with the thought that I might be rambling, I can look back at these stanzas and say that I was not. I was just too stricken by difficult and unanswerable questions to live my life with meaning. Why do we fail to live our lives with meaning? And how do we find things that can give us meaning when we are lost?
I hear another poem is coming every Saturday!