Surroundings, Unchanged

It’s in the still moments of breeze and shade in summer heat, cicadas buzzing in the fields with the faint sound of children splashing in a neighbouring pool. It’s our homes: the familiar spaces with familiar feet pacing the hallways, the same familiar phrases used in the same conversations. Things are good as they’ve been, and there’s no use in thinking otherwise. A question is oft born of friction as opposed to seamlessness. People don’t usually ask themselves why things have been so easy.

We believe what we are told by default, carrying with us certainties that were instilled before we could examine them. Routine is stability, structure is safety, sameness is non-threatening. The establishment of systems, the holding of faith in decisions that we have never challenged — we build our experience on these patterns.

This is what we think, this is who we are, this is where we are going. The trip itinerary in thirty-minute blocks, the semester’s curriculum solved before the first class, the scoff at the mention of anything that opposes an indestructible plan.

But then the new truth arrives, forcing us to hold onto two things at once and either determine which we will continue to carry, or risk never having a free hand. The heat comes in July and dissipates in October. It's the way it is and the way it's always been. It will always be this way. And then we visit Auckland, or San Diego, or Doha, and suddenly we're having to rewrite a small assumption that we once so easily lived by.

From the back we hear the doorbell, and with it, some news. Silently devastating, lingering, charged — and something gives beneath. Best not to blame the messenger, since we’ve never had the means to ask why or how we are. The first question must be asked by someone, and such is usually the result of circumstance. It also doesn’t always arrive so politely. Sometimes it lets itself in, sometimes it forces its way through the padlock, and sometimes we invite it over ourselves. But regardless of how it has found its way in, it has arrived, and it has left us feeling small, uprooted, embarrassed, or longing for the comfort of a view only seconds before held.

 

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, 

The Element of fire is quite put out;

The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit

Can well direct him where to looke for it.

— Donne, 1611

 

The sun doesn’t circle us, our species has not arrived finished, our haircut doesn’t work with our face shape. Now with ample explanation as to why. If we were to close ourselves off, tunnel our vision, would this mentality remain? Or would this do us a disservice now that the rupture's been made? Of course there are varying degrees of these moments, some bringing with them more weight than others, but the process remains the same — we once thought this, here it is untrue, so what next?

Surroundings, unchanged. Perspective, unmoored. What was once familiar is now strange. The world has seemingly been altered, but perhaps it is just us. We walk through the same summer fields, disoriented. The third fork on the left takes us to the clearing, or is it the second? The questions arrive, the friction rears its head, the chaos reveals itself. The mentalities seep their way into conversation. Planted seeds, sprouting, then overtaking the canopy. Our initial point of view starts out of habit, then is interrupted and unable to reach its end. The idea can’t conclude its journey with a tree left on the road. The obsolete belief still firing, mid-sentence, and hitting the blockade.

Some may run, some may vehemently deny, and some may admit the truth has always sat underneath. To face a new truth directly is a drawn-out, uncomfortable process like waiting for nerves to regenerate after injury — recovery takes time and can’t be rushed despite our best efforts. The body and mind will tell us when they’re ready.

There are moments when the question cuts deeper than others. Who were we before, and how do we begin again? Warmed milk can’t combat loss, especially in the silent absence of light. Reconciliation comes with each toss. Then, the morning light, and with it the need for the children to be taken to school and the errands to be run. Every so often we’ll feel the aftershock of that first quake, but they’re usually brief and small in magnitude. We’ve now seen that the ground is cosmetic.

These fragments of loss and change become a part of us. Some of us can still feel the subtle hum of a moment’s resonance and carry it with us like a familiar freckle. Perhaps it doesn't explicitly alter our day-to-day, but it certainly becomes a participant.

So what do we do with them? How do we move forward without our grip? How do we not look foolish? We push ahead — marked by rupture, and with a new lens, because the continuity is in man, not in the persistence of man’s beliefs. Loss reshapes but does not dissolve us. The self is marked and changed but continues from the losing.