Golden Age Recovery

Monday was a fun day, and historic. It was Jessica's birthday and she took the take off from work solely to watch the inauguration coverage, all the way through the inaugural balls in the evening, even as I watched the Notre Dame-Ohio State game. 

Around mid day I went for a walk in the sun. It was cool without too much of a nip of coldness in the full sunlight. I found it easy to walk down to Bell Road. It was nice to feel like it was normal to do that again.

The last couple years I've gotten used to the idea that things that are lost are permanently lost. Sometimes they are, but not always.

To say I felt a queasy disorientation during my walk might indicate I was feeling symptoms again from the vertigo, but that was not the case. Instead I am feel queasiness because of the disorientation of the historical moment. It truly does feel like something akin to a "new era" has begun, and that feels weird and unfamiliar. What are things going to be like going forward. I don't know.  I fall back on the past. When it did feel this way, if ever, in my lifetime. It will not have been the same as now, but it gives me a psychological anchoring point for my emotions and judgments at the moment.

The answer was supplied by the coverage. This was the first inauguration since Reagan's second inaugural in 1985 to be held indoors, due to weather, officially at least.

1985--yes. It feels like 1985. I can't explain fully except to say that back then I was very young and uncertain of the direction of my life, and the world felt like it was in a peaceful and prosperous era, full of promises of good things for the country in the future. But I was twenty years old and racked by the grief of being young and not knowing who I was, and what life might hold for me. I was anxious, even as the world around me seemed sweet.

It feels very awkward to me to feel that way, to remember vividly even in my body, my chest, my limbs, what it felt like to be that young. It is awkward because I am not young but old, and I see the years that have passed by. I no longer have the luxury of thinking myself immortal, as the young do, without knowing it. I'm embarrassed that I have let myself slide into whatever I have become. 

It is the awkwardness of rebirth and renewal. It is like waking and finding one's arm numb from sleeping on it, cutting off the blood flow, and one feels the pain and the blood starts flowing again. It is the soreness of using muscles one had let atrophy. It can be so much easier to stay dead than to come alive again.