Glass
The death of a business, or at least the death of a limb of a company, punctuates my experience of the warmth and beauty of late spring. This year seems laced with death of one kind or another. Accepting it with grace, observing it open-mindedly, being careful but not fearful has been my approach. Nature is filled with death and flowers, side by side. If this isn’t always apparent to me, that’s a failure of my perception more than any actual absence of one of these coexisting opposites. Am I choosing now to notice? Or am I simply capable of noticing for the first time?
All knowing involves active attention. We forget what we knew only a short time ago. Learning a thing once isn’t sufficient. If you aren’t revisiting it, reflecting on it, considering it anew, it is absent. It is the state of “not knowing”, even if you have known it once or twice before. Knowing is having, and not knowing is not having. That’s all.
It’s a special human thing to observe death and flowers side by side and think that it means something. It might, but probably does not, signify anything more than the material facts: that it is the end of spring and the retail space where I have worked for two years is closing suddenly, like a bird that has collided with an invisible pane of glass, folding its wings forever. Nobody knew that the glass was there. We were achieving an optimal velocity in retail terms. We were being told, “Excellent flying! Steady on!” by those who were moving the glass pane into our path.
Hitting the glass was a shock. It is a sad thing to witness something that once thrived crumple up to be subsumed by an indifferent landscape.