holding on

often times we find ourselves unconsciously grasping at things. for me, this most recent time, it was a digital watch. i was awakened before dawn to the grating mechanical sound of the alarm. i pawed around in the dark to find the offending noise and silence it for disrupting my broken sleep. once i laid my hands on it, i could not let it go. "holding on to time, i see," my dreams seemed to say to me. subconsciously grasping at those slippery numbers, those figures that slither through our fingers like snaking wisps of smoke, or like the finest grains of sand from an ancient beach. my life is not as specialized as i might think; everyone holds on to time in their on small or large ways. photographs, journals, scrapbooks, children, houses, memories. in this way, i was taking a literal translation of the concept. maybe because i never thought i had a use for the more superficial figurative interpretations of holding on to time, and those necessities you shrug off often have a way of finding their way back on to your shoulders. i really do need to find a way, just like everyone else, to hold on to time, and the watch in my half-sleeping hand was a most fitting way to let myself know that those numbers i disregard have some meaning in the larger sense, just as important as those distant mountains or a spectral halo around the sun or plate tectonics or the expanding universe; the human sense, you know? and being a human being, how could i not relate in some way to buying a house and filling it with pictures and newspaper clippings and children and fine wood furniture? because i certainly can: i'm building a house for words, and putting into it all sorts of crazy objects of thought, as much memories as future contemplations (which themselves are based on memories). such is the human condition, we can not be in the present or looking to the future without memory being the strongest factor. i'm holding on to words, which, just like numbers, are figures we train our minds to recognize and formulate into thoughts. and, just like numbers, our entire system of living is based on these sets of scribbled lines we place so much symbolism upon. and, just like numbers, words are slippery creatures, they can be, objectively, only random configurations of markings that we've been trained to understand.

holding on. human life is a lot of holding on. we hold on to a lover's hand because we want to keep them nearer to our self, or because we don't want them to float away like helium (which inevitably happens: read a great novel, watch a great movie, have a cup of tea and a conversation with an elder; it is unavoidable). we hold on to life, in the most dire or mundane of situations. all those houses, with pictures tacked to the walls with all those familiar yet morphing faces, or all the books on the shelves full of immortal words, are a means of holding on to something that doesn't change so much, because all of life is change, and change means those slithering numbers and words will mean something different tomorrow than they do today, which is to say our entire conceptual foundation of how we quantify life shifts with the minutes as the minutes themselves are shifting. the best we can do is to find something, someone, somewhere to hold on to.