Dying of the Light

I had the strangest feeling while driving tonight, the same sort of feeling I’ve had on and off throughout my life as the sun sets, a heaviness settling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted it to go away. I didn’t want to feel the loneliness of the world. The sun was down by the time I arrived at my apartment, but the feeling stayed with me. I wanted to tune out, to feel anything instead of that pain. After a couple hours of failed attempts to distract myself from it I decided to sit with it like I had when I was young.

My earliest memory noticing the dimming of the light, the moment-to-moment lessening of the brightness of the day, occurred in Waterloo, Iowa, when I was ten years old. I absently gazed out the west-facing window of my grandparents’ house while sitting on the side of a bed in an upstairs bedroom. Someone from downstairs called for me to let me know it was time for supper. My parents, brother, and I were leaving Iowa the next day to move to Arizona. This would be my last night in Iowa.

I continued to look out the window, watching the sun dip below the trees and the roof of the house across the street. The hazy golden sunshine sifted through the leaves, around the houses, through gaps of all kinds, and gave the neighborhood an otherworldly glow. What I saw didn’t seem real. I could detect the gradual darkening of the light, the deeper reds growing more robust while the shapes and forms of objects faded and blended together. The vibrancy of differentiation waned. I felt my heart sinking with the sun, an ache slipping from my chest into my stomach, an indivisible sorrow that seemed to grow with my awareness of loss.

I had been excited about moving to Arizona, the excitement of a child who thinks anything is possible, a naïve optimism that blinded me from who was not moving with us to Arizona: everyone we knew, every place we lived and visited, and every moment we’d experienced. As I continued looking out the window, attentive to the dimming light and the deep hurt in the pit of my stomach, I became more consciously aware of the weight of the change that was occurring, outside of me and within me. I had no language to describe what I was feeling, no prior experience that allowed me to intellectualize as a means to understand what was happening. Absent a thinking means to process what was happening I simply listened to the feelings. I felt an ominous foreboding that had an “other-than-me” quality, as if I was being taught a new but more serious way of understanding the world … so that I might develop the strength to handle the difficulty of what was to come.

That was a seminal moment in my life. I felt, even at the time, that I was no longer a child. I had a nonlinguistic understanding that I would never be a child again. The weight of sorrow I felt physically and emotionally seemed like a responsibility. What was that responsibility, though? I don’t think I knew what responsibility meant at that age, but I felt the truth of my experience as a grave responsibility.

I was overwhelmed. I write this to convey the reason why a feeling of somber emotional weight during sundown is significant to me. Sitting on that bed at age ten, I became more fully aware each moment as the light continuously dimmed until street lights came on to stave off total darkness. The ache I felt was rooted in love. I loved my grandparents, I loved my aunts and uncles, I loved my cousins, I loved my friends, I loved my school, I loved Cedar Falls and Waterloo, I loved Iowa. I loved all of it. Iowa was not utopia, but it was a place and time when and where I had been mostly surrounded by love.

All the love I’d received, that I’d felt, seemed to be concentrating itself into a ball, a sphere, deep within the core of my physical being. It was too much for me. I was a ten-year-old child burdened with the weight of awareness of the loss of nearly everyone and everything I’d grown to love. Everything and everyone was about to disappear as quickly and surely as the sun’s light. I cried. Silently. No wailing or sobbing, no terror or panic, just a simple, pure, but deep sadness. I felt older than the universe, an eternity of loss.

What shook me most was the loss of the moments as they seemed to pass. I wanted to reach out and hold on to the light, to stop it from dissipating, to stop the hands of the clock from ticking, to stop seconds from disappearing. I could feel an internal scream, a silent scream against the loss of time, a scream that became a commitment to forever remember the moment, to burn the moment into my consciousness so that it would remain with me, ever-present throughout my life.

Even as I did so, though, I raged against the dying of the light. It felt like death coming over me, the death of time. When I came across Dylan Thomas’s poem I recognized the description of the most sincere moment of my existence. I considered the notion that there are no original thoughts, no original ideas, and no original experiences. But I’ve come to the conclusion that there are only original thoughts, original ideas, and original experiences. There may only be one moment, though, and within that one moment all that is … is. Within the eternity of the moment maybe it’s life that is passing. Perhaps awareness exists indefinitely and finds the human body a feasible host.

If there is any truth to what I’ve written then the distorted experience of time changing is created by perception. How? I don’t know. No matter the truth of time, the perception of time and life changing creates an awareness that they are beyond my control. I have no capacity to stop time or to prevent my body from eventually decaying. Even if I do have that capacity, though, I haven’t figured out how to access it. What remains in the wake of this incapacity is a sense of helplessness.

It hurts. It hurts more than any other pain I have ever felt. To feel life’s finality approaching in the stillness of a moment? It felt like cruelty to become aware of this at ten years old but I think it would feel like cruelty at any age. And yet … it also feels like a blessing, like the greatest of gifts: To be alive and to be aware of being alive even if it also means being aware of life’s constant change and ultimate finitude. If it’s a privilege, though, it’s weighty and comes with strings attached.

Responsibility is the word that continues to pop into my mind. As I mentioned, I’m not sure what that responsibility is. Not intellectually. But I feel it as a physical entity that keeps my feet on the ground, tethers me to the earth, prevents me from floating and floating toward the heavens. But this responsibility—or perhaps duty—seems purposeful, not at all arbitrary, and it seems that the fulfillment of this unidentifiable purpose is the only way to free myself from this inner anchor.

The realization I had tonight, after talking with a friend about my experiences witnessing the sun set, is that this purposeful duty I must fulfill is the open, honest, transparent expression of love that I feel for not just my family and friends but for everyone, for each human being, even the most wicked and vile. On the surface, this sounds idealistic, naïve, foolish, childish, and any number of other derogatory terms. However, I’ve rejected this impulse most of my life and by doing so I’ve caused my own suffering. It’s certainly easier, socially, to avoid emotions that cause discomfort in so many others. Isn’t it odd that affirmative emotions should cause so much discomfort? That affectionate emotions trigger mistrust? Why mistrust care from others? Fear of the burden of responsibility that comes attached with loving awareness?

My friend wept during the conversation. She was going through a difficult loss in her life and the conversation unfolded in such a way that she felt comfortable weeping. Or she knew she didn’t need to hold back. Whatever it was, what I felt for her was love, a desire or impulse to heal her hurt. In the past I may have felt uncomfortable in this situation, but having experienced the same sorrowful ache earlier in the evening when the sun set I instead expressed what I was feeling. I expressed love, care for her. It was all I had to give and so I gave it. Did that help? I don’t know. But that same sorrow gave me the ability to empathize, to understand what I might need in the same circumstances. Honestly, the feeling of being loved—not a romantic love but loving-kindness—by another is as critical to my health and well-being as clean air and water. Self-realization, as much as anything else, is the integrative experience of feeling and understanding that the self does not end at the skin.