When I was teaching 10th grade English in a nouveau riche Long Island suburb, while I was going for a degree in social work and then a three year certificate in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and writing for me in study halls, late at night and Saturdays, I did not grasp the energy expended as I was driven to succeed — intellectually. I have never been driven by the holy dollar, a defense against the feeling that I could not cut it in business, a legacy of watching my father being a failure in most everything he did. Success for me was in learning.
I was more propelled than motivated. I associate to a tsunami at a resort as the lawnchairs, tables, grills, benches are pushed in front of the monstrous waves, detritus being given a monumental shove across the land. I wasn’t steering. I was just holding firm to the rudder as time hurled me forward. I chuckle at individuals who believe they are in charge. Fear drives us to control. I wander through my days now. I am retired, whatever that means, but definitely not retired from life, whatever that is. I watch midwesterners flock down to Tucson and “living” in adult communities which are really geriatric Disneylands. I observe them working out so as to keep death away. For many this is the best of all possible worlds. I avoid conversations as they don’t want to hear reality. I am beginning to enjoy my biases and prejudices about midwesterners. Flatlands make for flat personalities.
I near my end, knowing the time left is less than the time I had; I am going down the slope of the bell curve into the silt of eternity. I defend against this (See Becker’s The Denial of Death) in ways fully cogniizant to myself. Wouldn’t it, in fantasy, be wonderful if we could run from it, do something about it, avoid it, perpetuate our lives and all the other imaginative approaches we create to stave off death and dying? Death is the final loss of control and since control has been an issue in my life, I will die a miserable death, or so I conjecture. To surrender, to cede, to give up is difficult for me. I persevere, I am the tortoise not the hare. I come at you, I stick my jab into your mug, I tell the unvarnished truth as best as I can. I don’t lie, only to myself.
I wake up to glorious existence. I will go to sleep never to wake again. And so all that I have done will be a feckless mote somewhere in the void. How a waste of time to ask what it means. It simply is what is.
Although Freud was not far off the mark when he summed up life as being love and work, I feel there may be a third way as well. Using his jargon, it may well be a drive to be. I read recently that a scientist feels that DNA and RNA originally existed in the primal annals of time, and that to survive these molecules wrapped themselves up in an evolutionary sense with flesh and bones and body matter. In short, the cocoon we wear which identifies as Tom, Dick and Harry really is an apparatus for DNA to survive, the life force of the universe. That is a drive! So I feel I just am, what will be will be, that I have no real purpose, no real meaning, that I am driven by biological forces to live as long as I can to protect the elan vital within. My god, I am pregnant!
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