A Man for All Seasons

Still on the Run

I recently watched the 1966 film, A Man for All Seasons, which “depicts the final years of Sir Thomas More, the 16th-century Lord Chancellor of England who refused both to sign a letter asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII of England's marriage to Catherine of Aragon.” (Wikipedia)

Furthermore, I searched for an explanation of the film’s message:

“As one who remains true to himself and his beliefs while adapting to all circumstances and times, despite external pressure or influence, More represents "a man for all seasons”.”

That is a far more noble a description than fits me.

I have been on a journey of self-discovery. It would be more appropriate to say, as I move through the seasons of my life, I morph into new versions of myself. I notice that the new versions of myself seem to look very much like the version that I remember from the early decades when I played in the swamp with tadpoles and waterbugs; when I caught earthworms at night as the sprinklers at the nearby golf course forced them out of the ground and they were stuck together in an embrace of hermaphroditic reproduction; when I hilled potatoes and picked strawberries and planted asparagus with my dad and dispatched potato bugs and tomato worms.

I am comforted by the ability to remember that self and the feelings I had then. I can even reclaim them in some of my present moments though I can’t go back. All the circumstances and external pressures that have influenced me have not caused me to lose that early version of myself, but I have been shaped by the multiple decades of living between then and now. 

I am a living organism. I cannot stop morphing from one version to the next of who I am. I cannot undo what I have done, unhear what I have heard, un-experience what I have experienced.  People who have known me along the way have a snapshot of who I was when they knew me. 

I am no longer that person. 

There are certain characteristics that remain the same, whether it was my reactive temper they encountered or my listening ear. For the one, I apologize, and for the other, I am grateful for your willingness to trust me enough to share your thoughts and feelings with me. All of it has influenced, is influencing, who I am becoming.  

I read an op/ed in the New York Times, “Summers End, but Our Desires Last a Lifetime.” I am spending the northern hemisphere fall in Australia, their spring. I have lived pretty much my entire life in the temperate zone of the planet.  I love all four seasons. I like experiencing each season as it comes. Now that I am spending so much of each year outside of the country, I have some discretion about where I will be in any particular season. 

During the last couple of years, Winters in Montenegro and Portugal have provided more comfortable weather than the extremes in Kansas, Missouri, and Kentucky. Ireland and Scotland are cool and comfy during the heat of summer in the plains of the US.  Visits to Australia are best done in their spring and fall, since the hottest temps there match or exceed the KS and KY summers. In that sense, I suppose I am a man for all seasons. The season I am in at any given moment is determined by my geographical location.  

The cycle of the seasons is embedded in the core of my existence, whatever the weather at any given moment in time.  Dying in the fall, lying fallow in the winter, birthing new life in the spring, and savoring the lush greenery of summer living, is a metaphoric framework describing life as I experience it, moment to moment, day to day, decade to decade, past to future. Whether looking at reality through the lens of religion or science, philosophy or spirituality, Newtonian or Quantum Physics, as cyclical or linear, with or without the element of time, in the space/time continuum in which I am traveling, life is about letting go and moving on. 

Once a moment has passed, it is over. It is gone. It can never be reclaimed, but it has left its fingerprints on the next. The future moment does not yet exist.  It is an empty bucket whether there is a list or not.

My editor Frances sent me this post by Maggie Smith, Pep Talk: On Self-Trust, which includes this poem:

Future

What is the future?

By Maggie Smith

Everything that hasn’t happened yet, the future

is tomorrow and next year and when you’re old

but also in a minute or two, when I’m through

answering. The future is nothing I imagined

as a child: no jet packs, no conveyor-belt sidewalks,

no bell-jarred cities at the bottom of the sea.

The trick of the future is that it’s empty,

a cup before you pour the water. The future

is a waiting cup, and for all it knows, you’ll fill it

with milk instead. You’re thirsty. Every minute

carries you forward, conveys you, into a space

you fill. I mean the future will be full of you.

It’s one step beyond the step you’re taking now.

What you’ll say next until you say it. 

---

Along the way, as I have stepped into an unknown future, the need to let go of past iterations of Peter Tremain has been complicated.

My authentic self, who I really am, is in some ways different from former iterations.

Each iteration was equally authentic, but I am not sure people whom loved and respected me in one of those iterations would still love and respect me now - who I have become in the current iteration of my authentic self. 

I can’t go back. I was who they knew me to be. 

I have died to myself and risen to new life (to use a religious metaphor) multiple times. I am always doing so. I fill the future with each moment as I step into it, shaped by what has gone before. I could not have imagined what would drop into that empty bucket, especially in the last decade and a half.  

---

Sometimes I wonder if my urge to travel and move along from where I am to somewhere else after only weeks at a time might be as much running away as it is seeking adventure, discovery of an unknown future. I don’t want to disappoint those who have known me in past iterations, but I cannot go back.

I love meeting people new to me because I get to be who I am now with them. My stories are new to them. They are not yet tired of hearing them. There is permission to simply be: no expectations, no obligations, no strings attached even if we become friends. They are who they are and I am who I am. 

With that said, every time I come back to my family in the US, every time I visit in person or video chat or text those with whom I have a sustained relationship, I feel safe and secure. They know me. They may have known me through multiple iterations of my identity, and surprisingly, they still accept me.      

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When this posts to Substack, I will be in Australia, having traveled through a time warp from Tuesday, September 10 to Thursday, September 12, never to live Wednesday, September 11, 2024. This man for all seasons will transition directly from crisp fall weather in Louisville, KY to early spring in Australia. I have already seen pictures of the seedlings that will produce fresh vegetables and early spring greens in the garden of friend Lawrie Kirk in Canberra when I visit him and his family later in their spring. 

After two months abroad, I will return to the US for a taste of holiday winter in Kansas City and Louisville. 

The Destination is Now,

Peter