Tuesday, December 27, 2016

"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"

Now's the time during which all of my social media friends start posting about their year. A lot are already summing it up as a horrid one as a result of celebrity deaths. Some just had crappy years; others, not bad one. I haven't heard any really good reflections on the year.

For some reason, summing up a year has never worked for me. I am not saying it is bad or wrong to do so -- just that it has never been something I am inclined to do. And thinking about evaluating my year sort of makes me feel a little squirmy, if I'm being honest.

I think of bad events as bad events, but isolated ones. A year is an artificial construct of the human need to organize its existence. Maybe this is all just another manifestation of my often-visited concept of the real versus the unreal; the idea that there is so much that we see as hard reality that is just plain phony. A "year" is just bookends on the shelf. We just happen to place it between 365-day cycles. It could have been anything in terms of parameters... What's real is the death of a loved one; what's fake is that he died on a "Tuesday." It seems really -- at the lest -- unhelpful to call a whole 365-day cycle "bad" because within the same span in which one's car was "totaled."

Contrary to what I said above, maybe it is bad. It's really a kind of pessimism to label a year as bad because it contained a few -- or even a lot of -- bad events. Yeah...see? I was trying to be nice, but I think it is bad.

I think my other "problem" might be that I have always naturally done what a lot of people seem to have a hard time with. I really seem to "live in the moment." (Sometimes, this can be a problem...but that is another post.) For me, though, benchmarks have never really meant much. New Year's Eve means nothing to me. Graduations have always been something to get over with. I knew, sitting on the football field of Eastern High School in 1986, that I would be no different of a person the next day than I was before... There really is -- cliche, though it may be -- only now.

David Bowie, Gene Wilder, the all-of-a-sudden-beloved Alan Rickman and, now, George Michael were not killed by 2016 -- they just happened to die within the artificial frame created by humans.

So, no, it wasn't a bad year. Not to me. I'm sorry we lost those people -- especially Gene Wilder. But I just can't make it work out to a post about how mad I am at 2016. It's like blaming the shoe box for the shoes' fit.

As I looked up who died in 2016 for this piece, I saw an article for The Mirror: "Why have so many celebrities died in 2016?" Are people really reading stuff like that for "answers"?

Each of the people we lost is bigger than a calendar with inked borders, so let's not reduce them to some superstitious cause. We might as well go back to blaming fairies for stuff.



8 comments:

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  2. Nature reminds me that life is all about ebb and flow (regardless of what the media tries to convince us of otherwise). I do a lot of walking outside to keep my mind balanced and stay in the moment. Of course posts like this help too:
    https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-reasons-why-2016-has-been-a-great-year-for-humanity-8420debc2823#.16lxj8c9h
    :)

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    1. Nature is reality! That is one thing I know... Thanks for the link..

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  3. The Gerard Manley Hopkins poem "Spring and Fall" ("Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?") is handy here. All year I saw people mourning and wailing over celebrities they'd actually left behind years ago, especially musicians. Almost no one could name anything David Bowie, George Michael, or Prince had recorded since the early '90s. I particularly liked Bowie and Prince, but they were both so prolific that it would be awfully selfish of me to want more from them. As far as I can tell, people are mourning their own lost youth and using these celebrities as proxies for that.

    They're certainly not mourning the actual human beings beneath the celebrity facade. I mean, it's nice to see obituaries for Carrie Fisher emphasize her as a memoirist, novelist, monologist, and comedienne, but I'll bet she would have liked a little more recognition of her varied work before she was rushed to the hospital. And I suspect that if she could see the treacly memes and kitschy Princess Leia cartoons memorializing her this week, she'd respond with a raspy, mocking laugh.

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    1. Jeff -- I appreciate such a rare sentiment: the fear of selfishness. There is so much implied in all of this... I guess it could be argued that adniess can be a kind of selfishness.

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  4. I loved my mother's quote about David Bowie: "They've got 14 pages about him in the Daily Mail. I can't think of anything he's done." I felt largely indifferent to the celebrity deaths and my only emotions were ones of sorrow for their families.

    I think many of us react so strongly because the world becomes a less familiar place with every death and in a small but potent way, we feel older and lonelier. On that cheery note, Happy New Year!

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    1. Happy New Year to you as well, Steerforth. I love that quotation from your mother...I think I remember if from one of your posts. Getting oldr can be synonymous for getting alienated from the world as paradigms and faces continually shift. I fear you are right about unfaniliarity and loneliness.

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