Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In his beautiful home in Portland, sharing a scotch in the glow of our reunion, I asked my friend Mikel about his sister Aline. They had not spoken in a decade. She was the one who introduced the two of us many years ago in college. It pained me to hear. Aline and he did not merely drift apart, but a rift broke out between them. I wanted the conversation to end with him saying, but we are figuring matters out. Unfairly, I wanted him to forgive, for them to “move on,” a common conclusion when hearing about tough times between family members.

As much as I admire people who can live in the present, I also understand those who retain a righteous indignation, what Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas calls a just and “zealous anger.” I’m thinking of an artist who will never forgive her father for his demeaning of her as a girl, an experience which was different from that of her brother. She clings to her resentment for, as she reports, it subconsciously fuels her creativity.

I thought I avoided revenge out of laziness. A physical toll is paid when I hold onto feelings of intense rage — it’s truly exhausting to hold that tension, or that fire, in my body. I thought I was protecting my ease. But then, while writing a poem about an incident of joyriding, I recalled something long buried.

When I was thirteen, Eddie was older than me by five years; he was a neighbor who was in and out of jail for selling drugs. One day, he asked if I wanted to go for a ride around the neighborhood in a blue convertible Corvette. He said that one of his crew asked him to keep an eye on the car for a few days. When we turned the corner, six police cars, marked and unmarked, descended upon us with guns drawn. Eddie was on probation, and this incident sent him back to the penitentiary for driving a stolen vehicle. When he got out, a year later, he shot and thus paralyzed the guy who set him up. His need for revenge drove him to shoot another human being.

At a young age, I saw that the pain of rage and resentment is not just in your body. It can course through your actions, and send askew the course of your life. I’ve experienced my fair share of slings and arrows, wrongs done to me. As much as they hurt in the moment, I know they do not belong on the back of my future self.

Today’s poem reveals the wisdom of leaving the past in the past — of keeping your grudges behind you, as you embrace the vividness of what's to come.

Hurrying Toward the Present
by Suzanne Lummis

“No past tense permitted”
- Kay Boyle from A Poem for Samuel Beckett

Darlings, this may be the only 
great escape we ever make:
start dropping your past
behind you–seeds, kernels
to be pecked up by scavengers.
You won’t find your way back.
Or try this: package it,
mark it Was. Leave it in a locker
at the Greyhound Bus station.
Leave the door ajar. Let
a thief inherit it. You can bet
it’ll dog him like it dogged you.
Step smack-flat into
the blasting present,
your heart asserting Now-Now.
You feel neither the pain
left behind, nor what waits
tapping its hard foot 
up ahead.
And now, stand up the future!
Let it go on pacing and cursing
as it peers towards your whereabouts,
and the cat’s eye gleam
of its watch calculates
the lateness of the hour.

"Hurrying Towards the Present" by Suzanne Lummis.