I’ve never been one to spend much time looking at myself in the mirror, particularly of late. I’ve largely avoided it since sometime in the early 1990s when, after ingesting a powerful dose of LSD, I sat for what could have been five seconds or five days, staring into a mirror as my visage warped into variations of Satan, Bob Dylan and Benito Mussolini.
To be confronted, a generation later and cut throat razor in hand, with a face that looks increasingly like a bag of broken spanners confined loosely within a crumpled old brown paper bag, is something I prefer not to dwell on. Let’s just say I shave quickly and move on.
Anyway, I was splashing my face the other day and looked up and caught my mug staring back at me and thought, possibly for the first time in my life, ‘You look old’. By this, I don’t mean ‘older’, or ‘elderly’, or ‘aged’, but precisely that: old. That’s the word I want to use. Not that long ago in time, very generous friends were sometimes kind enough to remark that I looked a good deal younger than my actual age. And having not gone completely bald and fat, whatever vanity I have within me was happy enough to agree. Anyway, the rotten, stinking bastards don’t say that anymore, so clearly something has changed. It is of course, not surprising. I am biologically getting older after all and have, let’s be honest, spent a good deal of my life hurling myself uselessly against its barriers in a manner that’s going to leave some wear and tear. Add to which, in the last two years alone, I’ve been physically assaulted no less than five times. Two of those assaults were by women which – and don’t take this the wrong way ladies – weren’t so effective, once by some wanker who couldn’t hit a barn door with a punch if he was holding the handle, once by a guy who found me in bed with his girlfriend (fair play, I deserved that one) and once quite seriously and randomly by a genuinely dangerous thug, an event which left me – James Bond style – with a permanent and visible scar under my right eye. All that came about as a result of alcohol, in one way or another. Either they were drunk, I was drunk or everyone was drunk at the same time. Violence and drunkenness very much go hand in hand, as pretty much any victim of domestic violence will tell you.
But speaking again of my face – and who wouldn’t want to speak of such a thing? – I wasn’t troubled so much by the obvious signs of aging and damage, but just by a general sense of the sadness of things. And I say this not from a place of depression or misery, but from the genuine and very real sense that life can sometimes, often in fact, be very sad. And I think this is perfectly normal. In fact it’s actively healthy to acknowledge our sadness and just ‘be’ with it for a spell. I mean, if you find yourself feeling sad for weeks on end, sitting in a darkened room with a bottle of scotch and your head in your hands, then perhaps consult a doctor, but otherwise it’s okay to be in that moment, because – like all moments – it will surely pass.
At least some of what I write is informed by Stoic philosophy, from which I’ve taken a good deal of insight and solace over the last couple of years. A quote from the Stoic thinker and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, said this:
‘You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think’.
In some ways, it’s a sad thought, because it goes straight to the heart of a subject that most of us fear deeply and refuse to even contemplate, let alone accept: death. Immediate, unexpected death too. I know of plenty of people who died when they were least expecting it, and you see it in the news all the time. But, like the good Stoic he was, Marcus is merely stating an obvious truth: that death comes to all of us; but he then goes on to give us something more: we have this moment now, and it is infinitely, immeasurably precious and we can’t afford to waste it. It puts me in mind of the great words of Martin Luther King, when he spoke of the ‘fierce urgency of now’. He was saying that, when it came to the need for racial justice, there was simply not a second more to be wasted. To live life fully, as is our birthright, we need it to happen NOW.
Whatever the cause may be, and it needn’t necessarily be a political or moral campaign, it can simply be your life as you wish to live it, the time to do it is here and now, even as you read this. An essential part of this realisation is to accept the sadness that accompanies it. We have the moment and it is precious, but it will go, and, as one season follows another, all of our moments will eventually go for good but, unlike the seasons, not return.
So the next time you catch yourself in the mirror, stay a while and look, for here you are looking back at yourself, entirely perfected in the moment that is soon to pass.
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