Over and Next

Los Angeles, California

I have been working on a post entitled Pro-Choice. The text is specifically about how those of us who are liberals sometimes want to dictate choices to our likewise liberal friends. I am stating the obvious here when I write that some liberals enjoy using non-essential paper products. Some liberals eat meat. Some liberals enjoy a good old-fashioned wood-burning fire in their home fireplaces. Choosing to do any or all of these things don't disallow you from carrying the card. But it does set you up for some finger-pointing.

The post, which I probably will still put up eventually, went on in that vein and that vein is my now-usual pandemic rant. In spite of almost-daily meditation, I still find anger, frustration and their partner, sadness, accompanying me through most of my days. And if you don't, then you're probably not paying attention to what is going on around us and how it impacts our emotions. Or worse, you are one of those relentlessly black-is-white purveyors of positivity. And what are you doing here on my blog..?

The Pro-Choice post got backburnered because two things happened this week. The first was seeing the film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. A little, wondrous jewel of an upbeat message about community with a sly denigration of social media selfie-culture. And the other was when I heard that it was Norman Lear's one-hundredth birthday.

I keep a lengthly memo page in my phone which is entitled Writing. Whenever I hear or read something that I would like to write about, I jot it down on this list. Some are long quotations, others are simple, potential blogpost titles. In the list was something I had heard Norman Lear say in an interview about a year or so back. When asked what his secret was for longevity, he said it was: Over and Next. He doesn't belabor the problems and issues that have dropped into his life, rather once he has dealt with them the best he could, he is done to deal with what is next coming. He doesn't second-guess. He doesn't even look in the rear-view mirror. Maybe because I have always written since I first learned to string words together on paper, I feel as if my life's experiences are contained in an ever-growing, existential library. As if I can pull an edition off the shelves and there is an incident that once happened to me. Some are happy, like a great many of the posts here on my blog. But some volumes, the fat ones, can be devastating to revisit, and to remember that, yes, that happened to me. I can still feel residual pain. And I have stored it here. Obviously, the over part of Mr. Lear's philosophical duo is challenging. For me, nothing is ever really over. The emotions attached diminish, but it still lives on right there in my life's library.

The next part is also a bit problematic, as we have really been stalled due to the pandemic. There really wasn't much of a next for a full year. There was only a wait. And I wonder how that is impacting us now. After the film I commented to my friend, Barb, that I thought I was suffering from post-pandemic stress syndrome. She replied: Are we post-?

So how do you incorporate Lear's philosophy into a life with emotional flypaper? How do you let go? How and when should you close and lock the library, or even burn it down? And afterwards, how would the next be perceived differently? This is my Marcel the Shell-Norman Lear pondering on this overcast, late July morning. And perhaps a better content here than had I ranted on about my liberal friends who seem to not want to allow others a choice in all things. Many of us on the liberal side came through the sixties with its sense of freedom. And yet, to me, while the current conservative culture is as scary as all get-out, I increasingly find liberals, especially the ecorexic ones, to be über-critical and controlling. How can the challenge of that be met with Lear's over and next, as opposed to posting a good cleansing rant? Today, I am pondering that question. Meanwhile, this post is now over. Next...