| | [Editor's Note: The following blog contains morbid content. If at any point in time in reading the following you become disturbed and begin to question the author's sanity, please click here as crisis counselors are standing by and waiting to help you.]
I had the most gruesome assignment in school the other day. I'll tell you about the assignment and then, if you want, you can try it too. Personally, I think I liked it. But then again I'm kinda ward that way. The assignment is as follows:
1) Make a timeline of your life focusing on the significant events that have most shaped who you are today. Don't be afraid to be creative, but try to be concise. After all, doing a personal timeline that's the length of a master's thesis would smack of narcissism (which, it turns out, it a bad thing!). Make sure to note that many, if not most, of the events that are most directly responsible for who you are and how you understand yourself today are, in a word, tragic.
2) Make a timeline that projects the events of the rest of your life. Once again, be creative, but concise. It's also important for this part of the assignment to keep in mind that you are not projecting how you want things to happen ("married to European supermodel TBA in 2015 and raptured shortly thereafter" won't get you an A on this assignment, kids), but rather your best guess at how things really will go. Also try to keep in mind that if the people we are today are largely the pieces of our broken dreams (see part 1 of this assignment), then the events that shape our future are likely to be messy. So don't forget the deaths of loved ones, the occasional tragedy, and eventually the events directly leading to your own death.
For some punk-ass kid like me, the above was a haunting exercise in my own sense of mortality. For the record, I eventually get my master's and get married to someone famous (or at least someone I think should be famous), have two kids (both brats, of course, like kids ought to be), battle depression and a sense of orgin-less guilt, sell a ranch and an era with my family, bury loved ones, see one child get married, receive a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, and die in a car wreck at 64. Or at least that's one way I imagined that the rest of my life could play itself out.
The thing I got to thinking about when I did this assignment was, if my life does happen like that, what kind of person am I going to allow those events to make me into? A dead one for sure, but that's not too terribly surprising. What I'm really hoping and praying is that somewhere along the line, before I'm a dead person, that I can find the integrity to live a couple of days as something a little more than dead. Life is a mystery, all hollowed out by tragedy and yet in the same breath hauntingly beautiful. I don't know what kind of person I will become but, I know I'll be hollowed out by tragedy regardless of how things go. I really hope that, before I'm a dead person, I can manage to- for a little while- become the kind of person that is mysteriously alive. |
| | Posted 1/30/2007 12:28 PM - 55 Views - 2 eProps - 2 comments
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