Sunday Meditation #44: Interstitial Crisis

I have spent my life making much of the in between. The places no one thinks about, the leftover, the marginal, the edges of the edges. 

I am the interstitial. I am the space between. I am the floor between floors holding things rarely in mind unless they break. The floors that matter only if the power fails or the air conditioning gives up. This is my life, my head space to carry the pipes and the ducts that allow others to do the talking. It is my bed and I must lie in it.

Floor 13-1/2. Duck your head when stepping off the elevator. A condition of existence when one chooses to live in the margins of the book. Is this a cry for pity? No. No pity needed. This path is voluntary, if somewhat regrettable.

The battle cry these days seems to be "No regrets!", but in my mind I think that is just rationalization of emotional laziness, an unwillingness to acknowledge that what we have done may have hurt others. To swallow the pill of No Regrets is to announce to the world that we have not been paying attention to our lives, to living. To live honestly is to experience regret.

A digression, if I may be indulged. To my ears most of those people whom I have heard say "No regrets!", or have it tattooed somewhere on their person, seem to be overbearing types who have made a lot of willful mistakes. Their hoisting of the banner of No Regret is an attempt to disown responsibility, to avoid a reckoning of the emotional damage they may have wrought.

If I were to campaign my life on the platforms of no regrets, it would be from the perspective of not having done or said something regretful in the first place. My life would be lived in such a way as to do the things I want to do the way I want to do them, without hurting others in the process. An ideal, I know. One that is impossible to attain.

Ah, I see this has gone off the rails a bit, has it not? Somehow I drifted from a meditation on living in the in-between to a screed about pretending to live without regrets. How does this happen? A side effect, perhaps, of living life in the interstices, where one thinks too much and maybe really lives not enough. This is what I get for insisting on living at the edges, for making my home in the spaces in between.