On Growing Up (that haze of sunshine & dust)

Growing up, and the art of doing nothing. How I wish I was again sure of the former and a master of the latter. Because I’ve lived years, often without experiencing anything new, and fill my time - and myself - so much that there is no place left to give wings to my choices or desires.

 

I still remember the days when I naturally knew what was important -  reading, and thinking about what I  read; talking, and then letting long silences puncture my words; of waking up, and watching a random tree outside my window sway; of sitting at the dining table, of mum waxing eloquent about a new technique of soil petrification, and dad taking a spoonful and saying “This is good”, and a silence descending, punctured only by the sounds of blissful chewing. The choices were simpler, and unbeknownst to us, we were creating nooks for return, for solace.

 

In our tumbling, involved worlds now, we are heroes of the rote, progenitors of the already parsed, masters of the cliched, slaves to the routine. We don’t change rhythms, we don’t stop on the way to the office, we have an iron grip on whom we meet, we are shy for the new, we are afraid of the unobvious. In the immensity of possibilities, we pick a few strands and tie our world with them - and think it’s gift-wrapped.

 

A friend wrote in, when a poem from 9 years back popped up on her Facebook feed - “I miss those times of poetry, conversations, simplicity.” A flood of pleasure ran through me just thinking of those days. It’s easy to say that we’d moved on (the truth), it’s useless to say “let’s return” because we can’t. Every time is a different time, and we are in many ways different people - what connected us then was that magical alchemy of time which presented us with the plain brass of time which we turned into pure gold. Nothing can bring back that transition - yes, because it was that - as the rabbit hole of life is always destined to take us somewhere else.

 

Nostalgia is a bitch, but it serves a purpose. It reminds us that what is valuable to our memory is because that time was particularly lived in. It brings into our sensibilities the need to immerse ourselves into the ride and stop chasing shadows. To experience the leakages of time as the stream to slip on, to try not to multiply moments into meaning.

 

And minutiae becomes life - to give your sister’s hair time enough to grow, to let things pass such that the first wrinkle does appear on your mother’s face, to let our father’s laughter resound like echo inside us long after it’s last note has drifted, to let flowers float and be grounded.

 

In our realisation of the drift of time, lies the possibility of it becoming permanent parts of our being.

 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the joy and tribulations of growing up:

• Letting Go (a childhood song)
• When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train
• Those Days of a Lost Summer

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com

Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.

 

Following is the music used in this episode -

 

Music: Weightless by Frank Schroeter
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9092-weightless
License: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Music: Endless Expanses by Frank Schroeter
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9124-endless-expanses
License: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)