a Longing

I'm reading an interesting book by Abigail Thomas entitled A Three Dog Life. Her earlier memoir, Safekeeping, is fabulous (and penned in a most interesting, pithy, and bare bones style). I was surprised to find that she has written another memoir in A Three Dog Life, this time sharing her experiences during the five years since her husband sustained horrible brain injuries as a result of being hit by a car. He is institutionalized owing to his inability to function and although very much alert and conversant, he no longer has any (absolutely none) short term memory. He knows who she is but can't remember anything that he is doing, saying, or thinking a few minutes down the line. This is the story of her life with this "new and different man". He definitely lives in the present moment; it is all he has and will ever have. This points out to me that clearly, one can be pathologically affected by pure existence in the NOW if it is not tempered with memory, experience, and hope.

The author writes a paragraph early on in her book that struck me as quite insightful and beautiful. She writes about the "longing" that we all seem to feel as a very condition of being human. Longing for something......most times, of what we do not know. She writes:

"Twenty years ago I asked a friend if he felt (as I did) a kind of chronic longing, a longing I wanted to identify. "Of course, " he answered. We were having lunch by the pond at 59th Street, watching the ducks. The sun was out, the grass was thick and green, the ducks paddled around in the not very blue pond. I was in between lives. "What is it?" I asked. "What is it we are longing for?" He thought a minute and said, "There isn't any it. There is just the longing for it." This sounded exactly right. Years later and a little wiser, I know what the longing was for: here is where I belong.

I believe this is true; we are all longing for the feeling or the outright knowing that the place where we are right now is where we belong.