Sometimes it feels as though nothing really ends, that we carry things and people around with us over a lifetime. Tim Winton put it well when he wrote in The Turning, “The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.”
Things are never over. This is what I was thinking about at my book launch two weeks ago, trying not to be overwhelmed as I looked around the room dense with association, love and history. Many there had been in my life since I was born – their faces hovering over the cot. My parents have the capacity for long friendship. Now in their mid-70s, some of their friends had been around since they were in primary school. Go back further and their parents – my grandparents – were also friends. Things are never over.
My school friends were there as well, women in their 40s who in my mind will always be the girls. I suppose we all look different – ageing is real – but nothing feels different. Standing in the function room of a golf club, about to launch my book, I got a sudden vertiginous feeling of time collapsing. A moment ago we were at school! In that instant at the golf club, time seemed to lose its linear quality, it ceased to matter and ceased to mark things. Instead it was the associations that mattered, that were the true measure of a life.
It made me consider all those old people I saw on the news who, on the occasion of their 90th or 100th birthday, would look slightly bewildered, wrinkle a brow that looked like it had been shattered by a hammer, and say, “But I don’t feel a day over 20.”
I used to think they were deluded (how could they not know they were so old?!), but now I understand. There is something eternal in all of us – a thing that doesn’t age or change or calcify or rot. It is that eternal that we recognise when we see old friends, or go to a city where we were once vividly, vibrantly alive, or reconnect with someone we were once madly in love with, or be in a room full of people entwined in deep, ancestral friendships. Eternal flame meets eternal flame and in the glow, time and age ceases to be a measure of things. Things are never over.
We run on two speeds. There is the eternal in us, a sovereign everglow, always burning like a tabernacle light. But there is also – on another plane, a more material plane – progress. We evolve. We accumulate experiences, move around, change our minds, have sudden shifts in mood or job or relationships or passions or temperament or health. Over time we grow out of old behaviours, we get tired, domestic and professional responsibilities pile up. We change. We stay the same.
The day after the launch, my old friends met for lunch and were telling newer friends some stories. “Remember the time Brig wasn’t let into the Lorne hotel for looking underage, so we hoisted her into a high, open window and she fell into the mosh?”
“Remember that summer when she had injured both ankles and we had to get taxis everywhere – even one block?”
“Remember when she fell into the open sewer?”
OMG. The chaos.
“That’s not me any more. I’ve changed,” I protested.
Newer friends disagreed. The older me was just a watered-down version of the younger me.
We change, but we also don’t change. We progress but there is also some indefinable part of us that is fixed.
*
One of my first jobs was at a fried chicken joint in Warrnambool called Ollies Trolleys. About a year after I started, there were mysterious meetings, men in suits coming in, a new atmosphere in the store. What was going on? Something was afoot. When I asked him, my boss, an ex-seminarian named Norm, quoted what he claimed was Dante: “I will not change but I will not stay the same.”
It sounded like a koan or a riddle (I have been unable to verify if it was actually Dante who wrote it).
But now, years down the line, I think it contains a deep truth about life and I remember it often.
In that instance, KFC was in talks to buy Ollies Trolleys. Once the takeover happened, not much changed (we still sold fried chicken) but the shop did not stay the same (Ollies Trolleys was gone).
I’ve changed. Yet in the stories there is still a consistent thread of character or an essence. The person who stumbles (sometimes from great heights, sometimes not far), but is rescued by her friends.
I will not change but I will not stay the same. It’s the great paradox of being human.
Talking of change, this is it from me on these pages, for a while at least. I will not change but I will not stay the same. There’s an echo of this paradox, this riddle, in the writing life. Writers need to alternate between the business of living – having new experiences, being dynamic, surprising themselves before returning to the eternal and fixed. This eternal is the quiet, still business of reflecting and writing it all down.
For me, now is the time for the thrust, surprise and chaos of living, without the self-conscious need to make a story out of it. Thank you for reading. It’s been my pleasure to keep you all company over these last eight years.
