All Things Pass

Watched the first half of Living in the Material World, Scorsese's George Harrison documentary.  This half was much more emotional for me.  I watched it again in the middle of the night when Katie and the kids were asleep.  Feeling sick a few days ago, I started thinking about my mortality, like I always do if I'm feeling really lousy.  The Beatles get me feeling a little melancholy, too.  I guess it's their youth that is a big part of what makes their achievements amazing.  Seeing them slowly fade into old age and death is kind of depressing, as is rehashing the same songs that I have heard thousands of times and knowing that my favorite band, whatever that means, hasn't made anything new since I was three years old.  Maybe there is something about me being a little boy that I am grieving for, too.  I don't know, it's complicated. 

It's also pretty discouraging thinking about both John and George being harmed by their fame.  A couple of pathetic losers who made them the center of their focus.  Really only a few steps away from what all of us fans do, making absolute strangers into people we think we know and have a right to interact with.

All Things Must Pass.  The song is rather dark and mellow musically, and emotionally I focus on the sad way of reading that statement, on the brevity of life.  But it is equally about the way suffering and pain, loneliness, fear, these things don't last forever, either.  Seemingly insurmountable things do pass.  That's an idea I could keep close.

I was thinking about how I need to do something important, something to be remembered by.  Once I am gone, who will know I had ever been alive?  It seemed frightening to me to leave nothing of myself behind.  This was not something I was thinking in any obvious way; I had to dig for it to figure out why I felt blue.  But owning that, I stepped on to a second thought, and that is that the real problem with human beings, in a way, is this very desire to change the world so that your mark is placed upon it.  There is such latent hubris contained in this impulse.  Maybe the more mature thing to do, the more conscious, noble and correct, is to leave as little as possible behind you.  Love those you can, but don't build up some bullshit legacy.  Let the ground swallow you, everything about you if possible, instead of mounds of garbage and accumulated possessions, shards of plastic floating in circles in the ocean for thousands of years to come.  George got famous, but then he spent his last years gardening.  There is something to be said for quiet and small.