Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
- C.S. Lewis
It's the anxiety of loose ends, the chaos of possibility in a universe with no beginning or end. Each wayward thread poses a threat, waiting to unravel that timeless tapestry that stretches as long and wide as human history, as high as human ambition. Every generation past has stitched itself in, securing its place in time and space. But where are we?
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Nouwen notes that this generation is marked by a sense of historical dislocation - "a break in the sense of connection, which men have long felt with the vital and nourishing symbol of their cultural tradition; symbols revolving around family, idea systems, religion and the life-cycle in general."He writes:
Crucial for those who live in the modern age is the lack of a sense of continuity, which is so vital for a creative life. We find ourselves part of a non-history in which only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable. For modern-age people life easily becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly. In this dislocated state we become paralysed. Our reactions are not anxiety and joy, which were so much a part of human existence, but apathy and boredom. Only when we feel ourselves responsible for the future can we have hope or despair; but when we think of ourselves as the passive victims of an extremely complex technological bureaucracy, our motivation falters, and we start drifting from one moment to the next, making life a long row of random chained incidents and accidents.
Barring any notion of spirituality, John Berger makes an observation of "the world today" in his latest collection of writings:
Any sense of History, linking past and future, has been marginalised, if not eliminated. And so, people are suffering a sense of Historic loneliness. The French refer to those who are forced to live in the street as S.D.F. Sans Domicile Fixe. We are under a constant pressure to feel that we may have become the S. D. F. of History. There are no longer any acknowledge occasions for us to receive the dead and the unborn. There is each day's life, yet what surrounds it is a void. A void in which millions of us are today alone. And such solitude can transform Death into a companion.
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Perhaps the root of our disillusionment is that we no longer subscribe to the concept of narrative. The idea of an underlying connection; a single thread that runs through a sequence of seemingly disparate events in our lives. The idea that we can find in real life the same elements we discover in literature - symbols, themes, motifs, the elements that bind, so artfully, every character and setting together into a coherent, continuous whole.
As long as there have been human beings, there have been stories - myths, legends, folktales - passed along from one generation to the next. People have always told stories because people are stories; all the moments in our lives are indisputably connected by one unifying fact - they happened to us.
A thought crosses my mind every once in a while - that sometimes we live our lives as if we have lived life a thousand times over. I think of it as a Many Lives Hypothesis - it posits that the connectedness of the world today has provided each of us access to more people - and insight into more lives - than ever before, and that this knowledge has dulled our sense of expectation towards what our own life holds for us.
Because what is the point of expecting anything from the future when it seems that every outcome has been exhausted, every trajectory anticipated? When someone is always one step ahead in the game, whatever you choose to play at; when what happens next is inevitable, predictable but above all, inexplicable... an order, yes - but without sense or logic; try as you may, there is no algorithm to be found.
And the what if no longer inspires us - each possibility only reminds us of the million other possibilities we could, or will miss (or have already missed) out on. The quote from that Jonathan Safran Foer book - “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
But when did we begin to forget that in the midst of so very many lives - lives past, lives present, lives that will be, could be, should be - each of us only has one - our own? And there is so much that remains unlived. It's a wonder wonder enough to last a lifetime.
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A little while back I found myself asking a ten-year-old this: "If you could be any age in the world, what would it be?"
She thought for a moment, then told me quite curtly that she thinks there is no point in wanting to be any another age, because "then people would end up missing out the age they really were".