Looking Back

 by Shaun Lawton 

            Outpainting in DALL*E w/ 'digital watercolors' technique in DDG

    How words transform into weather patterns 

that keep the world in check on a seasonal basis 

  remains a mystery along with the rest of the 

questions and enigmas we have yet to resolve 

in our mind's eye.

      

    That's one of the ongoing problems with our human narrative. We have a tendency to forget we're partly behind the forging of the script, not just handed down over the generations, but we're so intent on writing the programs of our individual lives, our forgetfulness of the vital role we play in the unfolding dramedy of Life comes to the fore once again, leaving us rudderless and without a sense of direction.

   At least so I've come to regard a certain quality of our situation here, afloat if from nothing but the conjoined motion of celestial objects arranged in such grandiose a pattern as to have its origins escape our knowledge completely, and as for its ultimate outcome none but the blindest among us having the faintest clue. Looking back remains the very least we can do, and that's exactly what we do when we look in to the stars. 

 

   The notion that something or someone may be looking back at us while we fruitlessly search the constellations for any given so-called signs of extraterrestrial life becomes comforting when we imagine ourselves to be the ones looking back at perhaps those out there who may be in the process of searching for us.  The Trade-Off that seals our half of the bargain of existence seems to be that the circuit of eternity breaks for every incarnation made into this material plane.  With that momentary breach of connection comes the dissolution of death and the consummation of rebirth.  By looking back, in a manner of speaking we look forward. 

   By straying behind, we may as well be getting ahead of ourselves, because we're only repeating the cycle of exercise needed to move forward. Otherwise we're coasting on the winds of dream, which is to say spending roughly one third of our existence sleeping.  Look forward toward the approaching horizons of the remaining days of our lives. What you see there, whether fully formed in your mind's Eye or not, resembles more of the same as its ever been.  Looking back we get to look forward, as if into a mirror, to the time that we, like our own ancestors, make it as far as we can. 

   It can also be noted that we all spend just enough time here to never look back, after a manner of speaking. Seen in another way,  looking back is a form of memorization. A technique used by scholars and actors, primarily. When all the world's a stage set with characters realized from our dreams it will be the ones who gave away the benefit of their doubts whose bravery will be redeemed. This is simply another way to say that the endless set of eyes, both lidless and shut, that have arrived to the here and now, are always looking back on one another in our simultaneity of experience, as we all keep our attention set on the road before us dead ahead.