What Isn't Lost

 

 

Ruins at Ft. Union, New Mexico

 

Time passes . . . or maybe it is we who pass through stagnant time. Either way, change is the thing that marks the passage: the advance of the hands on the clock, the aging of our children, the graying of our hair, or the getting of a beard or pubic hair. It's not that time changes us, but time is the medium in which we all change. And everything with physical properties does change; even my adopted town, Santa Fe, despite the long-standing efforts of the city mothers and fathers to keep it as it is,  has changed significantly over time. Adobe bricks naturally return to the earth, the way people do. There are ruins all over New Mexico, some recent, some ancient, that establish this fact. A good deal of maintenance is required to make an adobe structure last, which is why concrete is now used to maintain the style.


 Nevertheless, unchanging places play an important role in our lives--places you can return to and find much the same as you remember them. Santa Fe seems to me much the way it did when I visited it as a child, and, though something of an illusion, that comforts me.



Our hearts and psyches need such places, touchstones that remind us that some things seem timeless, or at least change very slowly. We need unchanging places in our hearts, too: the memory of a particularly peaceful place or time, a grandparent's house you can revisit and explore like a memory palace, smell a pot roast cooking in the kitchen, see them laugh and feel their love again . . . or a spiritual place, where we reconnect with the eternal. It is critical to our emotional health that some things remain constant, and critical to our survival that most other things change. Caesar's boast, through Shakespeare, that " . . . I am constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament." suggests he was incapable of or unwilling to change. And this got him killed. Constancy, loyalty, strength, or genius are neutral qualities. They can bind one to destructive ideas and people, or the best ideals and the best people. We can be stuck in our memories, stuck in the past, stuck in our ways, or we can use the past to enrich and inform our present, make healthy change possible, enriching our own lives and the lives of those we love.



Where is the balance between constancy and healthy change? Where do we discover ourselves, affirm others, and also gain the strength to let go, detach, relinquish, and allow for change, growth, the future . . . whether that change seems to us for good or ill in the present. How do we extend the lives of old walls by replacing adobe with concrete, maintaining the appearance of changelessness, but those walls too will crumble one day. We can ossify spiritually to facilitate permanence, but never really can facilitate permanence, but can only remain a sad, disintegrating monument to something we refused to let go of until we pass from the scene. Certainly, some things ought not to change, but those would be fixed principles that give life, not attitudes or habits that diminish it. We can confidently cling to that which, at least to our best lights, seems good, loving, and true, (always subject to some correction) accepting that, in time, everything else will change; whether it returns to the earth, dies, or is irretrievably lost. But we need not be lost to ourselves.

St. Augustine, in his Confessions (4.9.14), said  "Blessed are those who love you, O God, and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake. They alone will never lose those who are dear to them, for they love them in one who is never lost, in God." Augustine wrote a number of less comforting things, too, but when it comes to facing change and loss, I have always loved these words.