I went for a walk this evening. It was a beautiful autumn evening with a two-thirds moon and the stars just peeking out from behind some cloud cover. The clouds were catching the distant neon glow, and just being pierced by the sharp points of light. I walked some way under the bright moon, talking to Rosie on the old earpiece and getting the crap out of my head with the excellent clear air.
It reminded me of another time when I used to walk alone in the sharp mornings and evenings, when I walked to school across the golf course. Now I know that most of us are fairly fixed in what we believe that we are seeing around us. For example, you expect to get home and see your home; to be known by the people there and have some measure of safety (well when you are a kid…) but I used to have this recurring semi-fear that when I got home reality would have shifted around me and I just wasn’t going to see what I expected: I was going back to a home that wasn’t mine any more, and in fact in this reality it had never been so because I had never existed. I had a mantra: Right time, right place, in time and space. It must have worked.
Looking back now I think that it is something to do with my father dying suddenly. I remember being taken to school by someone else and then my mother telling us that he was dead when we came back in the afternoon. I didn’t believe it until my aunt smiled a weird smile at me when I ran away to the back garden. Fucking hell, this was my first experience of impermanence, and it must have hung over me for ever after that. My eight year old mind realised that all of everything is a dream where we agree on the vocabulary but not what really hides behind the labels.