The above photo of Ronda taken through the arch of the parador definitely captured a good memory.
When I'm in Spain, I love to visit the city of Ronda. March and April are my customary months abroad. I've been returning to Spain for sixteen years. COVID, however, has made that impossible for a second year in a row. Now more than ever, however, I try to start my day with a few good memories. My photography is ladened with them. In fact, I've taken hundreds of photos viewed through arches. Arches provide a good allegory for how humans see life. The particular arch we're looking through provides a specific perception of life. Change the arch and you may change your point of view. I follow the photo memorabilia with several hours of writing each morning. Later in the day, I might paint or play the piano or take a walk in nature. Gardening has saved me more than once in the last year as well.
You might say that I've created a kind of magical parallel universe viewed through an arch of my own making.
I'm retired so I'm spared the hectic life of my past. I have the luxury of time and solitude. The older I grow, the more time I spend in my parallel universe Some days, it's almost more than I can bear to look out of the window of my creative bubble. The past few days, the awareness of the rise of anti Asian sentiment has sent me into a tail spin, however. I have family and friends who are Asian. I also have family and friends who are black and transgender. All wonderfully talented, smart, beautiful people. It pains me to think that just stepping out of their homes to go to the supermarket could be risky. The very idea that there are people all over the world who hate them enough to hurt them fills me with anxiety.
Being generously endowed with a full measure of empathy, I've suffered since I was a little girl.
From the first moment that I became aware that humanity was so hate ridden, my heart was broken. Around the tender age of eight, I realized that life really wasn't precious at all. That was just a phrase that we were taught but that bullies and bad people could and would if given the chance hurt others, even children unfortunate enough to cross their paths. I learned about the holocaust when I read Anne Frank's diary and was traumatized, literally weeping into my pillow at night from the knowledge. I was around eleven at the time.
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It's been hard for me to be alive because of my empathy levels.
Not everyone is endowed with an equal measure of empathy. It seems that there may even be such a thing as an empathy gene. It's a curse on many levels, however. Empaths feel the pain and suffering of others in their own bodies. My mom used to hide newspapers with horrid stories of carnage and evil doings from my eyes because she knew how I'd react. It would send me into the throes of despair. I was always the girl who stood up for the kid that was being bullied. I wanted things to be fair in life. But all these years later, they still aren't and that still makes me sad.
People have told me on more that one occasion to just stop thinking about the atrocities of life and focus instead on the good things.
And, I can do that for stretches of time fairly successfully, but then my empathy is triggered once again by a random act of evil forcing me to withdraw into a kind of wounded state of shock. Yes, all these years later, I'm still shocked by the inhumanity of humanity.
So, I protect myself from too much pain whenever possible.
I've basically designed my parallel universe as a sanctuary where I can spin imaginary tales of creative inspiration and safety. I limit the time spent with other humans more and more. No wonder my favorite poet of all times was the recluse Emily Dickinson. Reclusion is a kind of paradise from the constant realization that true justice and equality sometimes feels like an impossibility.
Whenever I had one of my spells as a kid, my dad would laugh out loud and then remind me that life isn't fair.
That would piss me off and so I'd cry even more. I don't think he understood my plight nor my pain. I've experienced that same reaction most of my life from people who either have found different coping mechanisms or lack empathy. They become impatient with my persistent response to the horrors of being human in an unjust world.
My perception of the world now that I've turned seventy hasn't changed from when I was a child.
I realize that the little girl who cried into her pillow when she read about slavery in America or the plight of the native Americans was the purest form of me. Prior to that knowledge, I really did believe in a beautiful world burgeoning with exciting experiences. I didn't see the devil in the faces of strangers. I wasn't yet tainted by cultural conditioning. My innocence protected me from reality. I had no idea that my parents had brought me into a world where they wouldn't be able to protect me. Nor that I was destined to experience the harsh realities of life either firsthand or vicariously. As my innocence was slowly taken from me and replaced with knowledge, I was at first incredulous. How could this be? Why would this be? And, then slowly but surely, I began to see these human behaviors as more common than I'd realized. With that realization came a kind of tough exterior. I'd lost my innocence forever. Nothing would ever look the same again.
I live in unprecedented times.
Technological advancements have been phenomenal. No other time period in the history of humanity has made such progress. Furthermore, change is exponentially faster than ever before as well. We can barely keep up with technology as it continuously shape shifts, producing a world that previous generations wouldn't even recognize. Yet, our social evolution lags far behind. In fact, the gap between our social and technological skills is widening daily. We are cavemen with cell phones. We are emotion-driven creatures with limited problem solving skills who most often react to situations rather than resolve conflict. Our primordial instincts to reproduce and survive at all costs are exacerbated by the selfish gene making the very technology that we've designed a dangerous weapon in our hands.
Oh, dear, I'm sure my eternally optimistic peers are resorting to shaking their heads while tsk, tsk, tsking by now.
What a dark outlook on life, they will tell me. And, they are partially right. In fact, I hope they are right. When I listen to them, I can feel a ray of hope and it's uplifting. Maybe it's not as bad as all that, I think. Maybe I'm overreacting. For a time, I feel better until I read another headline a few days later, that is, and a new arch appears revealing the same world I that broke my heart when I eight years old.