Flipped Upside-Down and Seeing Straight...

[Jung]

So, I turn 45 today…

Yet another birthday has come and it is time to… Well, it’s time to do what? Just what is one supposed to do on a birthday?

For me, I find that sitting down and writing something on this day has become somewhat of a tradition and this year is no exception as I am once again looking at a blank Word document and wondering where my mind will take me.

I never have a process for writing things like this and just sort of sit down and start moving my fingers and seeing where they will take me. As usual, I am amazed at the random stream of unconsciousness invading rational thought and taking me to the proverbial words on paper.

As is natural on the anniversary of one’s birth, one tends to think about the past wondering about things that could have been and then slowly looking towards the future and wondering about things that might be.

I guess birthdays have always just been a number for me. Well, that’s not true, I guess when I was young, unwrapping those gifts and eating that cake was pretty important, but for most of my adult life, birthdays were just an excuse to go out, drink a little too much and stumble home with some warm company.

The only birthday that really meant anything was my 25th. I was still in the Army back then living in Korea and I had just lost my long time Korean girlfriend.

That girl was supposed to be the one. She was pregnant with my child and the marriage paperwork was in the system. And man, was there a lot of paperwork! It took enough red tape to make a bureaucrat blush for a guy in Military Intelligence to marry a foreign national back then.

Well, it wasn’t meant to be and fate had other plans. For, on the way to her home to see her family one last time before the wedding, with me back at Camp Humphreys working my shift, she was hit by a drunk driver going about 90 miles an hour and my soon to be bride and child were both killed on a lonely highway half way between her old home and her new one to be.

All the stages of depression hit and finally after a couple of weeks after working through a lot of pain I got rid of my off post apartment and moved back into the barracks as everything reminded me of her.

It was July 22nd and I was turning 25. I was sitting around my room waiting for my friends to get off a swing shift to head out and do some damage to the liver trying not to think of anything in particular.

For some reason I was going through some old boxes looking at old pictures and random pieces of paperwork. I know, not really smart when not trying to think of the past. But again, fate stepped in and like some cruel irony I came across my birth certificate. I saw that when I was born my mother was 24 years old and my dad was 25… I broke.

It took a while for me to be fixed, too. With many years passed since then, I will always remember my 25th birthday as it is a constant reminder that life has plot twists and turns that one can never anticipate.

I don’t relay this story for pity or to depress the hell out of anyone, I just am trying to say that putting tick marks on a calendar really doesn’t mean anything until we ourselves put meaning to them. I was, or so I thought that day, feeling fine yet when my mind interrupted my serenity, all of a sudden the passage of time meant something.

So, here I am at 45…. Forty-five… Looking at that number I feel like it should mean something but it really doesn’t. Intellectually speaking I assume that 45 really is the down turn. At 21, I suppose, you can claim to be an adult but you still don’t know shit about life. 30 seems to be significant as you have to admit that you are now no longer a child but I escaped those feelings by running away to Never Never Land in my 30s.

40 is an important milestone as, “Life begins at 40” however, for me it also was simply a number and you can still lie to yourself and say, “Well, I still have at least half my life to go. 80 isn’t that old…”

But 45… Well, 90 starts to seem like a dream and given the way I take care of myself… 90 will be a blessing. So here I am at 45 wondering what to do with the down slope of mortality.

I remember reading once about a psychologist named George Stratton back in 1890-something, once did an experiment where he wore eyeglasses that inverted his visual field of view. Stratton argued that since the image upon the retina was inverted, it seemed reasonable to examine the effect of presenting the retina with an “upright image”'.

His “upside-down” glasses consisted of two lenses of equal focal length, spaced two focal lengths, so that rays of light entering from the top would emerge from the bottom, and vice-versa. This was based on the knowledge that vision in humans is actually inverted in the ocular cavity in the first place and the brain actually flips the image so interpretation of what we see can be processed.

He postulated that if the brain was given the information upside-down and then the mind flipped the image, the brain wouldn’t be able to process images correctly. What happened though truly astonished him…

After a few days the mind corrected itself and he saw everything as it should be. He was able to function normally seeing everything as it should be. When he took the glasses off everything looked upside-down again and it took a few days to once again adjust. The mind altered his reality and made life livable.

I’m sure this wasn’t the results he was looking for but for me it is perfect poetry. The mind adjusts and allows us to be who we are regardless of outside influences.

I guess this is how I feel living the life of Peter Pan, the boy who would never grow up. Life here in Never Never Land is accepting that you choose to put on those glasses and then just never take them off.

After a while you forget that things here just aren’t normal and flipped (pun intended) upside-down. However, for now, at 45, this is the life I choose to live and I couldn’t be happier. My mind has adjusted and I am living the life I want. Sure, things this year have been a little rocky with family, friends, relationships, but over all, life is still good. Life is still worth living.

However, with the way I treat life I realize that I still have things to do, people to meet and places to go. I know I’m standing up at this peak of 45 and looking down not on a bunny hill slope full of boredom, redundancy and monotony, but a black diamond course of adrenaline filled fun, danger and excitement.

It should be a fun ride…

Peace,

- Jung

P.S. Amazing what you can write in 20 minutes…