Waiting For the Apocalypse

As I near my 60th birthday (it's in December), I have found myself in a deeply reflective place. I guess that birthdays ending in a zero can have that effect. I've been particularly intrigued with the way that inevitable historical events have impacted me emotionally. I grew up during the Cold War, and in elementary school we practiced getting under our desks to safe ourselves from nuclear weapons. Finding back, it's hard to fantasize anything more ridiculous. A nuclear weapon detonating in any place near our school would've resulted in the instant annihilation of every single child, desk and classroom for miles around. Why were we made to institution doing something that would've been so utterly useless? To this day, I'm not entirely sure.

In essence, I grew up with the feeling that doom was just colse to the corner, that the Apocalypse was only a heartbeat away. When the Cuba missile accident happened, in 1962, I was 12. The next year Kennedy was assassinated, and like many of us who experienced that time I felt as though something deep inside my soul had broken. By 1964 I had already begun to oppose the growing Vietnam war. As the war broadened, snaring millions of young Americans in the draft system, I felt pretty helpless. Yes, I demonstrated. I counseled draft resisters; helped put out an private paper (the Peace Pipe - I was the poetry and hippie life editor). I "Raged against the dying of the light," as Dylan Thomas wrote so poignantly - and through it all, I dreamed of a peaceful world.

Nuclear Weapons

Why bother going to school? I thought. The world is just going to blow up anyhow. But I did go, and finally the Vietnam War ended. For a while, my sense of an impending apocalypse faded. Then inflation roared to life, and the pundits warned that the theory was going to break down and there would be food riots in the streets. My house became so concerned that we bought some acreage in the mountains of northern California and prepared to ride out the coming storm of economic collapse.

It didn't happen, of course. After 18 years, convinced that we lived in a more stable world, we sold the land and moved on. That was in 1998. Three years later, on 9/11, it seemed as though the four Horsemen had finally come for a visit. The stock store had imploded with the .com bust, and it seemed to me as though our lives would never be the same again. Even though most of us finally located into the new normal, the question, "When is the next hammer going to fall?" has never been very far away. There have been fullness of hammers, haven't there? Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, and the apocalyptic financial meltdown we're still struggling through. Gee whiz, boys and girls, are we having fun yet?

I now realize how much of my life has been framed by waiting for the Apocalypse. It's one of the reasons I drank so much for so long - it helped numb the terror. If you unquestionably knew me, you would know that I often still feel as though I am waiting for the Apocalypse. In a way, I think most of us are, even if the only Apocalypse is our own death. Not whether we die in some cataclysmic apocalypse (wouldn't that be dramatic?) But simply that we die.

Here's my point: knowing that some Apocalypse (whether personal or planetary) is coming, we can whether choose to cower in a corner, or (almost defiantly) live each moment filled with a cornucopia of rich experiences. No matter how much time we have (ten days or 10,000), our lives are defined by the choices we make in each moment. I've spent much of my life afraid of what "might" happen - and I have missed much. As I turn towards the final decades of my life, I pledge to redouble my efforts to live 100% fully alive, no matter what might be looming just over the horizon. Are you willing to make a similar pledge? I'd sure like some firm on this journey.

Waiting For the Apocalypse