Writer’s Prompt

My Mantra isn’t what you might expect

Allow me to Explain

I loved playing tag as a child in Brooklyn. Went at it for hours on end. Until darkness came, parents called and the legs finally started to give out. This game here is not as physical but just as exciting. Thanks for Sherry and Chris for letting me play.

When the shit is hitting the fan, which seems to be happening non-stop around the US these days, and life seems to be scripted by a sadist, I try not to look too long-term and project the current calamities too far into the future. I like keeping them exactly where they are — right here, right now.

In this way, the future, that wonderful blank canvass that is rather sensitive to change and well worth the respect that most of us give to it, gets a little protection. It doesn’t need to hear about everything that’s going on right now. After all, what can it do about it?

My ability to bleed off emotions, like pressure from a boiler about to go, has enabled me to cope with life’s roller coaster, without constantly losing my lunch or my sense of balance. But I have a secret.

And it’s time for a confession as well. I believe in past lives and as an extension, futures ones as well.

I not only believe in them; I have recalled them in such vivid life altering colors that they are as much a part of “my existence” as the life I am living right now.

And as a result, and this is one item for my all-time gratitude list, past lives do something very special — they put current ones firmly into perspective and prevent a single time, a single moment from getting too out of hand. Because there have been many others like this one; some better, some worse and all of them connected to who I am. They have also conveniently provided me with a mantra that I have used for almost 50 years.

It’s been worse. Just keep moving, and it will pass.

By no mean is this a nihilistic view of my circumstances; nor is it an attempt on my part to sidestep the shit storm raging outside my windows and pretend that nothing needs to be done.

It’s simply a way of keeping it real.

Life in blocks or 70 or 80 years, a perfect one and done scenario, has never appealed to me. My insatiable curiosity of all things past and present, always lead me to the same question — is this fucking it?

Sitting in church; sitting in the confession booth. Sitting at 30,000 feet, shaking like a frothy margarita, have all provided moments of deep internal probing. Which usually ended with,

Why, goddamn it?

A phrase that disturbed the nuns and priests, my mother, my friends, the passengers I encountered on this journey, minus a few who felt as I did, and instilled in me a desire to seek out an answer to the question that I seemed to have been born with.

When my father dropped dead in front of me at the Bronco Charlie’s Restaurant in Suffolk County New York, I was 13 years old. I remember two things more clearly of that time than anything else.

I didn’t cry.

I didn’t mourn the end of his life.

Years later, I understood why this happened. The answer didn’t come easily. I had to wade through the grief that finally did arrive and try to understand a concept that was 100% antipathetic to the religious teachings of my youth. But it came to me.

His life wasn’t over.

Fast forward 57 years, past losses and heartaches, bad years, and failed jobs, no money, and no plans to change it and what I have, to hold it all together and keep me getting up and getting on with it, is that same mantra.

That same ironclad belief that whatever is happening right now; whatever stress and anxiety that is compounding every day, has happened before, and I am still here. Still sane (mostly) and still willing to meet a new day — tomorrow.

So today, no matter how many fucking videos I watch, of our glorious leader making a complete ass of himself in front of the entire world. No matter how many times I see people equate the right to free speech and to bear arms, with putting on a fucking mask and helping their fellow man. No matter how often I feel hope being squeezed out of me like a fucking baseball-sized kidney stone, and endure the endless chatter of the negative naysayers in their slick suits and bleached hair, I have one undeniable piece of history tucked neatly into my psyche that ain’t going anywhere.

It’s been worse. Just keep moving, and it will pass.

I’m tagging most of the same group from Sherry and Chris’ article. Please feel free to jump in, named or not. Thank you!

P.G. Barnett, Kristi Keller, Helen Cassidy Page, Timothy Key, Caroline de Braganza, Rasheed Hooda, Kira Dawn, Desiree Driesenaar, Gurpreet Dhariwal, Kathryn Dillon, James Knight, Dawn Bevier, conny manero, Mary Holden, Tessa Schlesinger

Joe Luca is writer and editor for ILLUMINATION and a published author and writer of children’s stories, short fiction, non-fiction articles, screenplays and poetry. Publications include Child’s Life, Children’s Playmate and others. There are some other articles below — have a read. And thank you for stopping by.