Mono No Aware.
What’s that, you ask? Why, that is, of course, the Japanese philosophical concept wherein one feels a certain specific kind of sadness due to the transient nature of the human condition.
I am currently suffering under a hefty dose of this particular flavour of sadness. I have come to the realisation that, these days, there’s not actually much left of my early life. And realisation has me constantly feeling slightly abraded, like I’ve managed to accidentally drag my very soul across a lurking, hidden cheese grater while washing the dishes.
My father died when I was very young – I have zero personal memories of him, everything I know about him comes second-hand from family and friends who knew him – every single one of them has nothing but good things to say. He sounds like an awesome guy. I wish I’d known him. But, alas, nope. My earliest memory is telling my Mum that I was, despite her insistence, NOT going to go to this “school” place. I was five. My next oldest memory is late in primary school, so there’s some big chunks missing there. But my dad was gone before even the school thing! I have no memories of him at all.
My mother, on the other hand, died recently. She raised me by herself, and I was (and still kinda am) fairly shattered by her passing. Unless I keep myself busy with other stuff, I find my thoughts turning to her. We had an occasionally tumultuous relationship, but I would give a lot to talk to her again.
The point of this, though is that there’s nothing quite like having both parents gone, when you have a kid of your own, to make you 100%, completely, fully aware that you sure do have zero claim to not being An Adult. You had better get to Adulting, yo. No-one else is gonna do it.
Mono no aware.
A few years back, I found pictures on Trademe of the house I grew up in. It was being advertised for sale, and the interior had been completely gutted and renovated, but there was enough left of the bones of the place to recognise it. The alterations were considerable. They’d subdivided the land, gutted and redecorated the interior, and painted the red brick of the outside. Also, while looking at that on google maps, I found that the block of shops near that house, including the bookshop I used to frequent and the fish and chip place where I played my ever first arcade game (Space Invaders! A classic) are now not even shops any more. They’re all part of some kind of megachurch complex. Sheesh. The primary and high schools I went to are all still much the same, but I have few good memories of those.
Oh, that brings my thoughts so the best place I ever lived in while in Christchurch, a huge chunk of an old house that had been turned into a studio flat. Rent was $50/week, cheap even back then, and someone (not sure who, could’ve been anyone) had hacked the prepay power meter so that it measured 1/10 of the power that you were actually using. The landlord used to show up at weekends, having done his day job all week, and work on the house – I remember helping him carry in a huge beam that he spent all day getting installed to replace the ageing, possibly rotten original. He did that kinda work CONSTANTLY. Always replacing, upgrading, repairing that house. He was always talking about how great the place was going to be when he was done. That whole house is gone now, red-zoned, a victim of the 2011 earthquake. Nothing left there but grass. I can only imagine how angry the landlord was.
The excellent brutalist 70’s university students association building I spent much of the 90s hanging out at was also badly damaged in the same earthquake. It was deemed not economic to repair. They built a quite nice looking new building, but it doesn’t have the common areas that the old one used to have, where students could hang out. Sure does have shops, though. So it’s got that going for it. But all the places where I spent time? Gone.
Mono no aware.
I see very few of my friends from before I moved to Auckland. Some of them have passed on as well, including my friend Nigel B, whom I managed to beat at Quake deathmatch a total of four (4) times ever, and my mate Scott, owner of a series of the most absurdly modified Mark 1 Ford Escorts that Timaru had ever seen. And a handful of other friends, also deceased. I find myself missing them all.
The other day I had some difficulty remember what my first cat looked like. That’s not a pleasing thing to have happen. I did remember, eventually! Dinky (name choice by my Mum. Not me. Just to be clear) was in fact a tuxedo cat, sharply delineated black and white, and he was very cuddly and very sweet. He lived into his late teens. Not bad! But it’s a hell of thing to reach for a memory of your first pet and not find it straight away.
I even find myself missing ex girlfriends – not even in any kind of prurient fashion, it’s just that they used to mean a lot to me, I still think fondly of all of them, and I hope they’re doing well. But for many of them, I have NO IDEA if they’re doing well or not. We’re simply dropped completely out of touch. They were very important to me, and now … maybe they’re doing great? Maybe things have gone badly for them? Maybe they need help? It seems like I should know, but I sure don’t.
Mono no aware.
LEST THIS BECOME A PITY PARTY, please realise that my life NOW is very, very excellent. My stepfather is still around, still fit and healthy, I talk to or message with him every day. I am happily married to a wife who is WAY more awesome than I deserve, we have a kid who is as COOL AS HELL. We have a nice house here in Auckland, our mortgage is not too absurd, by NZ standards at least. I am back to being a student – this time I may actually finish my degree. I have extended family in Canada, and when Covid backs off a bit, we may even get to go visit them. My little family is the best, and they make my life great.
Plus, of course, it’s 2022, THE FUTURE, and I do kinda live in the sci-fi cyber utopia I wanted. We all have pocket supercomputers and there’s a global data network that links you to the totality of human knowledge plus twitter, and my pocket supercomputer has literally thousands of books on it and network access to buy basically any book that isn’t already there and I can read ANY of them ANYTIME I WANT, and I drive an electric car that goes WHOOSH when you accelerate and the video games here in the future have AMAZING graphics, and they made an Iron Man movie and it ruled and I can watch any episode of any tv show I want whenever I want including every episode of Star Trek, and honestly kid me would likely have given five or ten years of his life just for the tv show thing, never mind all the other cool nerd shit.
The future is good, and life is good!
I have very few complaints about my life as an adult, but … it is definitely different from when I was younger. And the key point, of course, is that there is certainly no going back – those changes are permanent. Time surely is a one-way street. And I’m feeling the fundamental sorrow of that in a way that I never used to.
Mono no aware.