Rembrandt van Rijn: Self-portrait (c. 1628)

"TheAges eventually reveal everything …"

How fortunate for me that I inhabit this particular time slice in history. I sit here this morning, surrounded by TheAges, much of their story as yet unwritten. Creation's probably only beginning, precursor very likely hardly hinting at upcoming marvels. I try to remember that much of what I take for granted today was unavailable to even the most powerful people in the world a scant few generations past. I see no reason not to believe that the future, the one within which I might at best aspire to become a small footnote, won't deliver similar wonders. Born neither too late nor too early, I seem to be suspended here. I am in no particular hurry.

Almost five years ago now, I began this portion of my journey. I committed to writing at least a small essay, some little story, every morning, each day. I've missed a few days over the subsequent years, but no more than a handful, leaving something like eighteen hundred twenty-five stories in my wake. I conservatively estimate those stories weighing in at something over one million, two hundred seventy-seven thousand words, many of those, articles barely worth counting. These stories, I've bundled into almost twenty books. By the upcoming Solstice, that entire catalogue will already belong to TheAges. Where they go from there, nobody really knows.

Truth told, I was writing for my eight times great grand children, for I intended those stories to chronicle my manner of living. As I must have explained somewhere in all those stories, my original inspiration sprang from the realization that I knew next to nothing about my forebears. I might have known their birth and death dates, perhaps their last known residence, but they left behind nothing I could access that spoke to how they addressed the fundamental difficulties of living. I can speak with some assurance, that each of them, even the very least of them, mastered at least the rudiments of living in their time, somehow sidestepping Black Plague, The Hundred Years' War, and father time at least long enough to bear offspring and nurture them to the point where they were able to muster their own meager masteries in turn. How they managed to pull off those harrowing escapes, I have little evidence other than broad, general histories purportedly written in those ages, though, due to popular writing conventions, few of those stories actually speak to anybody's manner of living. Their authors chose to focus upon something else that must have seemed more important than cataloguing anyone's manner of living, like accomplishments.

I freely admit that I, for one, never managed to figure out how to live. I was never all that successful at anything I attempted. I think it a marvel that TheAges so far have all been populated by people who were probably just about as clueless as I've proven to be about living. Nobody apparently need necessarily be all that masterful in their manner of living, all that conniving, all that clever. A few will bore the rest of us with self-helpless advice, believing themselves much better positioned than most to actually know better, but TheAges snicker over their arrogance, for they choose the path of self-importance, the well-worn trail TheAges eventually unveil. TheAges reveal everything, though not everyone's there then to receive her message.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Reconning, #PureSchmaltz