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By: JMertlich,
6/22/2009
Dipped in Original Wisdom
Posted by Pavi Mehta on Jun 16, 2009
High in the Andes live the Aymarans. A tribe born with their toes dipped in original wisdom. They place the future at their backs and face their past with the intentness of a woman scanning a mirror for wrinkles or chin hair. An Aymaran gestures over his shoulder to indicate next year and will point straight ahead if you need directions to yesterday.
Perhaps the rest of us lied to ourselves about the future. Dangled it like a carrot in front of our noses, only because people can be such donkeys sometimes. Throw tomorrow like a stick or a newspaper and tell us to "Go Fetch" and we will, because we are a race freighted with hope, a people who have collectively deified the bend in the road.
Deified is a palindrome. It ripples forward and backward with equal meaning. Unlike the future it can be read both ways. The future read backwards is erutuf. An exotic word that bursts on the tongue like an unheard of tropical fruit, sweet and strange. Erutuf. The truth is we are the ones who have it all backwards.
I know in my old bones that sing their aching melodies through the night, that the Aymarans got it right. It is not the future but the past that looms that blooms in front of me unfailing as my neighbor's azaleas. We're walking home backwards, every step is a point of discovery and return. There is in this reversal of position and perspective, a certain comfort to be derived.
Moving quickly is less important now. Anywhere I can get to is not where I am going after all. I shall linger over fruit bins at the grocery store and think of my grandmother. I will weigh, shake, tap, rattle and listen for ripeness and I will not rush.
How pleasant it will be to renounce planning. No more frantic to-do lists tacked to the fridge with plastic magnets. No more pale yellow post-its papering my wall. No more penciled in calendars. You cannot possibly prepare for what is behind you. Why make pretence of trying? All I need do is show up on the doorstep of each day. Serendipity shall orchestrate the rest.
Perhaps I will miss a bus or two along the way. Fortunately, the future is not a bus, and there is no call now to shove skyscrapers aside with my shoulders in an unquiet quest to climb aboard a different life. No call to jingle the moments in my pocket impatiently, like spare change. There is time to wait without wishing.
Now that the logic of haste and desire has left me, maybe I will sit on a park bench and feed pigeons at midday. Maybe I will scatter peace like crumbs by the handful and find my significance in small things. That would be nice.
In this new scheme of things I learn that the flip side of having your head in the clouds, is the miracle of walking on air. In this new scheme of things, death is behind me. No longer a shadowy summoning that blocks the sunlight ahead but a fond prankster who will sneak up one day when I am otherwise occupied, and surprise me, with a hug.