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I’ve been a Bowie fan for a long time (Labyrinth, anyone?). I’d be the type of parent that completely Zappa’d out and named her kid “Bowie.”  That’s probably why the universe has kept me from procreating, but that’s neither here nor there…

I’m the type of music dork that gets hooked on a song for a few hours, clicking the “repeat” sign and just absorbing the song until, somewhere in the fourth hour, I never want to hear that damned song ever, ever again. I do that with TV shows, food, etc.  Maybe it’s the part of obsessive behavior I let roam free.  In any case, today it’s Bowie, and I can’t stop listening to “Changes.”  It’s this line that nailed me to the floor: “I watch the ripples change their size but never leave the stream of warm impermanence, so the days float through my eyes.”

The idea of impermanence has been something that seriously resonated with me for a while. Nothing is permanent, and as the song implies, everything changes.  We change.  I use science often as a major defense mechanism against long-term relationships, so the idea of change is just…biology and, thus, not scary at all.  Our hormones change.  Our bodies change. We are essentially becoming different people all of the time. 

 So, in the ongoing relentless change that my body and my mind undergo–in my thirties, everything seems different. I feel different. I react differently. I want completely different things. I was lying on the couch the other day with my dog, Joplin, who gazes up at me with deep brown eyes filled with both love and mischief. I felt completely happy and content.  Part of me, at some point in my youth, would have been itching to DO something and not “waste time.”  John Lennon once said that “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”  I fully agree and understand that now. I also cry easier, tell people “I love you” often, and find myself wishing to be a part of my nieces’ and nephews’ lives. Changes—you know—oftentimes for the better.

All it takes, really.

I also stopped buying into the excuse that because we change as part of our biological destiny, we can’t maintain good relationships long-term. Obviously, there are plenty of people that have already proved this theory wrong.  I’ve not been one of them. Or have I?

When I talk about people I know and love, most of them I have known for a decade or so (give or take—28 years with my oldest, dearest friend). Somehow I have maintained those friendships that long (patient friends is my theory). I guess I have always believed in and been a part of long-term relationships, just…the platonic ones. 

Proven then: the acceptance and belief that impermanence is life and vice versa, and change is our only constant, is not mutually exclusive to healthy relationships. The patterns I have created for myself, now that they have been proven illogical, are likely to fade…just like “Changes.”  43 times…it’s enough already.

Okay, maybe just a few more listens… 

Skeptically Yours. 

It’s my Birthday!!

Last year at this time (almost exactly), I stood at Rockefeller Center and felt the pulse of New York City under my feet.  My mother and I were being tourists on a double-purpose trip to visit John Lennon’s memorial at Strawberry Fields on the 8th and to celebrate my birthday on the 10th. It was late day, and as the sun was reclining into the horizon, and the lights of Christmas decorations seemed to glitter everywhere, I looked at Prometheus bedecked in gold by the ice, and I almost fainted.

It seemed like the weight of the entire city was dropped squarely on my shoulders, and I absolutely reeled, everything a swirl of chaos and Christmas. As soon as the lightheadedness left me, I changed my entire life.

Rockefeller Center and the tortured Prometheus have appeared in my life twice, both during strangely revealing moments. Once, as the background while being proposed to, and the second, the background to breaking it off and leaving all of it behind.

It was sort of an epic birthday for a skeptic like me to trust some sort of Universal message that led me to make gargantuan decisions and just blindly run for them.  It’s one of very few moments that led me so clearly.

This year, exactly 365 days of, as I’ve said to many people this year, “trying to figure my shit out,” and I still have a lot of chaos swirling around me; I have a few more things figured out, but I am nowhere near a point where I feel like this year and this universal guidance has come to a close.

What I know is that one year ago, I started in the right direction. I am on some sort of path now, still kicking stones along the way but gradually making progress.  My travels this year have allowed me to reconnect and fall in love all over again with my friends, stay up too late and be too social, go to bed too early and just sleeeeeep, burn the candle at both ends, rescue a dog, enjoy time with my mother, start restoring my Buick, put my Nova back together, take better care of myself, relax and enjoy a few incredible moments, screw up a lot, wake my passions for writing and acting, and move past bitterness that clouded my judgment.

To my friends and family that allowed this year to be all kinds of chaos and comfort, thank you. I have a weird, special thank you for Prometheus also. I often say “there’s a reason for everything” is a bullshit statement said by people searching for meaning in a universe that functions mainly on energy and coincidence without any greater guiding purpose. If I pass on the life-is-meaningless-existentialism for a minute and just look at the symbolism here, it’s clear that this statue meant something; that’s its somehow not a coincidence that it existed during these moments of both entering into something torturous to me, and the ensuing escape. For the unlikely task of making me think twice about the meaning of it all, thank you, Prometheus.