What Price Comes with the Rearview Mirror Obsession?

Sometimes you just gotta take a walk...

Go take a walk and look at others walking around you. They look down, they look into their phones, they look up and around. You know what they don't do much? Look back at where they just came from. Driving is slightly different. People are in machines that move far faster than the human body was built to move and there are other machines speeding past. Still mainly looking forward, they look into the rearview mirror a bit more —not to see where they've been but to see who might be coming up behind them.

Looking back commonly has a practical angle and, in most instances, is accomplished by stopping forward momentum for a bit. The long gaze into the past must be accompanied by a cessation of going places ahead.

In JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire she introduces us to the pensieve, a bowl of memories saved to revisit.

"One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form."— Dumbledore

The past year has been an almost obsessive gaze into my own version of this magical item. I've always been overly self reflective, examining my past to learn from it. It may have been the seed planted by my freshman social studies teacher who assigned a task for each of birthdays—write down everything you learned in the past year. My guess is that most of the kids back in 1980 did it for the grade and never revisited the exercise but me? I've done it for every birthday since.

Most years contain a mixed bag of learning from my mistakes, learning from my successes and a few random goofy things that likely have something to do with cheese or pop culture. This past year, staring into my rearview mirror has primarily been seeking out and bemoaning my many failures in life. My failures as a son, brother, and uncle. My failures as a husband. My failures as a friend. Job failures. Artistic failures. From the view of my past year, my entire life has nothing but a series of monumental fuckups.

I know that this version of myself is narrow and untrue and I find that this persistent false nostalgia renders me motionless. I am standing still, an unblinking stare at where I've been without much concern about the next step I take in a futuristic direction.

A few days ago my dad, after a week of serious illness amidst his litany of infirmities, decided he wanted me to take he and my mom to Home Depot. He wanted to get some tomato plants and potting soil so he could grow some tomatoes. When my mom asked him why, after a week when she was hit with the sudden realization that she needed a checklist entitled "Things to Do If He Dies at Home," would he want to put in the labor needed to plant tomatoes? "I need something to live for," was his cryptic reply.

My dad is in the place where he has stopped moving forward because he is slowly dying so the only place to look is back. He tells me stories on the porch of his days working as a pin boy in a bowling alley or the time he was with a redneck friend in the South. He is remembering his life in the past tense because he no longer feels he has a future. Yet… the tomatoes. It's a tiny act of defiance against the chaos of his weakening body and mind. I want to eat one of those tomatoes because it will be juicy and filled with that sort of blind hope that there is a future to move into.

This weekend wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Easter Sunday a year ago, my heart was split into eight diminishing pieces and this ensuing year has been giving time for the bizarre jigsaw puzzle of scars to shore up. I recall the pain of the blindside but, like the time my back went out on our fifth anniversary in London, the memory of it is distant. The year has either gone incredibly fast or laboriously slow depending on the day's activities. Sometimes I even wonder if any of it actually happened, the tale so strange and outsized that it could only really happen in my imagination.

So I've begun taking long, unguided walks. Discovering my surroundings, listening to music, shedding the self pity involved with such a loss. I think about the small acts of hope I encounter, I think about the grand "What if..?" concerning my final marriage, I think about how much ground-level joy it brings me to gift my family with experiences they would not likely dig if I hadn't had access to tickets.

Walking through the ravaged parts of a city whose ass was kicked by COVID but always looking forward. A tiny act of defiance and rebuilding of hope in a future beyond this moment in time.