Slow Dancing

Henderson awoke this morning, as he had on some other mornings lately, with a fog-bound sense of dread.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head to the day for a moment, and then turned away, closing his eyes against the light coming in through the window.

“Lena,” he said, “I just need a few more minutes.”

It had been, in truth, more than just a few mornings.

They came with a vague, unfocused, sense of foreboding.

Lena was, and always had been, an energetic early riser. He had been like that too when he was a bit younger. And even now, on some mornings, if he had a task to do, somewhere he needed to be, or someone he’d promised to help in some way, he had no trouble opening his eyes minutes before the alarm would ring and he’d be up shaving, showering and having a cup of coffee. He’d be alive with energy. Alive with purpose. Alive with relevance. A relevance which was invigorating. An invigoration that he savored, however fleetingly.

The sense of dread was shapeless. Not like as a young boy when he had awoken with terror in the middle of the night. That would wake him suddenly, gripping him with a sense of his disappearing into a vast and endless universe of death and obliteration. Of confronting his own inevitable return to nothingness, unable to calm himself by thinking the feeling would pass, or with rational thoughts of that earlier time of timeless nothingness, before he had been born. Before he had a consciousness. That was of no use. Try as he might to think thoughts of a pleasant ignorant time of non-being, he failed.

No, this dread was a filled with a shifting sense of hopelessness. Of being edged aside. Of being inconsequential. Of being overburdened by a life that traveled too fast and with a no longer discernable purpose. The purpose once being, or so he thought, of making a difference in the world. Of course, that was unrealistic and wholly unrealizable, even in a modest, local, and narrow sense. His mother, he clearly remembered, told him once or, more likely, many times, “Don’t think, Henry,” she’d said, “that you can change the world. Nobody can.” Of course, he’d not believe a word of that then. How else, he thought, was the world ever changed? Not by chance. Certainly not through divine intervention. People were the engines of change in the world. For good and for bad. For good and, more often, horribly for the worse.

“Are you sick?” Lena would say on some of those mornings.

“My stomach doesn’t feel right,” he might say. Or more likely, “No, I’m okay. I’ll be up in a minute.”

That sense of being pushed aside, that sense of not counting, of being irrelevant, was at times exacerbated by his hearing and his dependence on hearing aids. They worked. They worked okay most of the time but not when he was in groups of three or four or five and where there was crosstalk. He would  turn his head one way and then back and then in another, hoping to catch the thread of a conversation, any conversation, that he could follow and hold on to. Often, he’d find something else to focus on or he’d just step back. And then that feeling of self-enforced separation would tarnish him. He loved being alone but not under those circumstances.

He’d read a book once many years ago: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. The future, Toffler had written, in 1970, was rushing at us so fast we had too little time to adjust. And not only that. It would continue to accelerate faster and faster as technology and communications built on one another. Soon, where we were and what we were about would become beyond unfamiliar, too disturbingly unrecognizable. Henderson had not felt that then. He was young.

That was it, he realized. He was slowly being rushed at by life at twice or three times faster than he felt comfortable with. His own obsolescence bearing down upon him. There was an expectation that he would adjust; should adjust; as well as his expectation that he would be able to understand the new jargon, or the old words used in new and unclear ways, or how new devices came out before he could figure out the current ones, and how, of course, the new versions quickly became the new currency of belonging, however temporarily. His inability to use a simple phone/camera/email/internet search device had become the marker of his own loss of personal relevance and agency.

No, that too was only symptomatic. It was not the heart of the matter for him. It was deeper, more pervasive. The world around him at times, the world he read about, watched, and heard about, the world others seemed to constantly talk and obsess about, the world of the blurring of right and wrong and truth, of buy-this-now, of scams, of shootings in once-safe places, of widening inequality, of ignoring the common good and do-unto-others, of the worship of GDPs, profits, AI, and all things crypto-meme-celebrity, or of neglecting the earth and all of its inhabitants for some personal gain, and all of that life-diminishing world, was rushing at him like a vast slate-gray tornadic wall.

The world of slow but sure progress, of peace, of comity, of consideration, of righting wrongs, had long filled him with a sense of pleasure. The rightness-sounding Obama “hopie-changie” world Sarah Palin disparaged. A world of hope guiding action. Of patience and planting bulbs in the fall. That world seemed already to be burning, flooding, starving, withering, and dying around him. This was no entertainment or topic of idle conversation. It was deadly serious reality.

The dread he woke with lasted all day on some days. Not all of them, but on those days, he could not read or work. He wanted to curl up in a closet. He only wanted to close his eyes, to make peace with it all in some way. To wake later up with hopefulness. Or not wake up at all.

And then, another day would come, perhaps the next day, when the dread disappears. When he makes a to-do list of his own choosing, crossing off items he’d noted as he’d taken care of them… feeling whole again after planting the mums, baking a pie, reading a book he wanted to read, talking to a trusted friend, or, more often, feeling Lena’s gentle touch and holding her close, dancing slow with her like they’d once done at their wedding.