This lack of direction and loss of time flies directly in the face of something terribly important. Time is short. Jim Croce said it best when he said, "There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them." He was far too right about that sentiment. I imagine him spending the last moments of his life reciting the lyrics to Time in a Bottle and thinking, "Damn, I really have got to learn not to take everything so literally."
One of my favorite movies is Harold and Maude. I love over-the-top humor, especially if it's eccentric with an underpinning of sentiment and kindness and joy. Harold and Maude has all sorts of things for me. Harold is bizarre and creative and plays with his death and mocks his own and everyone else's life while taking everything incredibly seriously and with earnest amazement. Maude is a young/old soul in an ancient body who manages to be incredibly beautiful and sexy and earthy and insane and innocent and wise and loving and realistic at once. It's a love story full of breaking rules and the union of two lost souls, two quirky and should-have-never-met people who some how, some way find each other. We should all be so lucky to find that one-in-a-million love, that soul mate who reaches into the very depth of us and validates who we are, who sees us and with whom we share precious instances of pure joy. Gallows humor and joy and innocence and love and irony all go together in life. Harold and Maude fall in love and express it physically, making a taboo age difference irrelevant. What other people think about them becomes as ridiculous as forgetting your own name or that the sun rises or the smell of a rose.
I probably relate more to Harold than Maude today. I see something wildly amusing in pretending to hang one's self while sporting a Hello badge" with the message, "HELLO MY NAME IS: Goodbye Cruel World. He is all farce and yet deadly earnest as he doles out macabre punishments to his mother on a daily basis, punishing her for not seeing him, for not recognizing him and for having such detailed and exacting expectations about who he should be.
Add to that a Cat Stevens, pre-terrorist [!], score and suddenly the movie is filled with a radiant joy and some sort of supernatural understanding that seems only to happen in darkened theaters making you feel, if for an instant, that you have some perfect knowledge of How Things Should Be. It usually ends about the time the credits roll, but before they do there is an unmistakable and glorious sense of rightness with the world that just never lingers when the lights go on.
So back to being lost. Harold is lost, I think. I think he finds himself through Maude; a wise and loving friend who loves him completely and then leaves. She leaves to die. And even though, for some, this might be the ultimate betrayal, she knows something that Harold senses. She knows that life is eternal and simply floats away like a weary and beautiful butterfly. The lesson is that we all take responsibility for coming and going as we please in this life and that true compassion and love aren't about attachment but about loving while letting people live in your life with an open door policy of being invited to stay, but not your prisoner.
Maybe being found is really just taking the time to pay attention to yourself. In a world of stupid demands and really tedious circumstances it's easy to stop listening to your own decreasingly loud cries for help. Your frustration and pain and anguish and bitchiness are more often than not, just your own cries for your own attention. No one can hear you but yourself and if you aren't listening you are the architect of your own abandonment. The first place to get seen, to get heard, to get acknowledged and to get forgiveness, love, acceptance, and a friend is the mirror. It's not an act of narcissism, it's an act of self-preservation. We spend our lives shouting, "See me!" When really all we need to do is see our selves.
In this high-tech interweb world that I still think is the single most amazing thing to happen in my lifetime, we have a tendency to social media ourselves into personal submission. I think I simply ceased to be in my quest to be heard. I have gone away now to listen to myself. I have spent years trying to bang pots and pans together loudly and consistently enough to never, ever hear my own soul's pleading.
And so in closing, maybe something from Cat Stevens who I still think is a great tragedy of some sort that I can't quite put my finger on. If anything, just the fact that he stepped away from his music to focus on his religion seems confused and unnecessary. After all, music is a form of God in expression. I miss him. But this isn't the time or place to lose focus again and go off on poor Cat. Let him seek his own voice while we take a moment to listen to his heart:
Oh very young what will you leave us this time.
You're only dancing on this earth for a short while.
And though your dreams may toss and turn you now.
They will vanish away like your Daddy's best jeans, denim blue, fading up to the sky.
And though you want him to last forever you know he never will, you know he never will.
And the patches make the good bye harder still.
Oh Very Young, c. Cat Stevens, all rights reserved, Earth Tour, 1976
The short dance to me means it's high time to get my tutu on.
Love--
Beauty
