BAGS
The face looked back, eyes puffy and bagged through the readers he was sometimes too lazy to take off despite the blurred walk across the room.
The face reminded him again that this exterior casing was becoming more and more crunchy and worn. Six fresh puncture scars across an abdomen that refused to succumb. Fluffier than the last 25 years. Never were there abs of steel, but this version appeared mottled and thickened. inexplicably bloated.
The face defied the racing mind just behind the eyes. Sparks and ideas at breakneck speed. An aching desperation to do. To be. To create. A breath to calm, to reset. To capture all the things and progress one at a time. Which one was most important (all of them)? Which one would satisfy (none of them)?
The face looking back didn’t seem to align with the thoughts inside. With the one overarching thought. That anything was possible. That one day he’d arrive. Become. Fulfill.
That face looking back though, doesn’t look like the energy beneath.
It looks like it should be winding down.
Naturally, he winds up.
//
For the last 37 years or so I’ve had this feeling that the best is yet to come. That what I want is right out there past my reach. I’ve felt that “if I could only”, I’d get there. If I break it down it’s a feeling of “never enough”. Of not living up to my potential.
It manifests in everything, it’s a driving dissatisfaction coupled with this feeling that anything I do is what I’ve come to expect of myself. Never accomplishment. Never to be celebrated. This is just what you do.
Recently, (think the last 3 years) I’ve wondered if is this a Gen X thing? I am not huge on overarching generational themes, this spreading of similarities over a people who grew up during a certain time, but this dissatisfaction and feeling of lack seems like a pinback on a faded jean jacket, riding high next to the pins from The Cure, and IDOL, and DEATH TO THE PIXIES. We know something big is coming. It’s just out there beyond.
For me it feels like I am forever young. Ageless. That my career and the big things I am to do are still to come. That I am constantly gearing up for “what’s next” while blindlessly going through the last “what’s next” I started last time. Last time was one, five, twenty seven years ago; so focussed on the next that I miss all that I’ve done and have never felt attached nor present.
It’s a feeling of disconnect of the highest order. Here I am doing great things, but these things aren’t really what I should be doing, I should be doing other greater, bigger, things. I realize these others will become these current great things, yet I can do nothing to stop this constant churn.
So I wonder. Is it just me? Or is it a whole generation, or is it a whole everybody? I don’t think it’s everybody. I think there’s plenty of content folks out there. I see it and I’d say I envy it, but that’s not quite correct. I don’t much envy anyone as nothing is ever what we see and my world is worth envy.
//
You see the bags under these eyes, this age creeping in. These eyes looking out see the future, unbound, looking out to what’s next. To a place he’s present and feels like his visions for what could be are fully blossomed in this make believe world that lives one inch behind the bags.
#hugsandhi5s
Very well put, Pat! The way I’ve been thinking along the same lines lately is that “well, if big things are still to come, they better come fast because I’m running out of road.“
This makes me think about the idea that the self does not exist. Maybe the self that we assume is responsible for our desires is just editorializing about choices that it has no control over, but can only struggle to explain. We remain dissatisfied because we think we are answering the call of the self when the real center of our choices is much more mysterious.