Darkness or The Workshop

It is a difficult time right now, inside and outside.

Many people, I have come to think, might feel about what is going on in the world right now like I feel when I step into my father's old workshop.

To give some more perspective: my father was a quite gifted craftsman and carpenter. Alongside his ability to speak and translate many difficult languages, his handiness and general capability contributed to the near perfect image of a male alpha that I was presented with as a child. An imagine I have struggled to live up against from day one, as one-sided and incomplete as it might have been. For all intents and purposes, as I grew up my father was the man and he could do anything.

He build our house from scratch and accumulated a great assortment of tools in the basement and constructed himself a proper workshop that he used frequently. As far as I remember, he was a real work-horse and would only stop in the evening to have dinner and a beer. 

Since he died when I was still very young, he really never had the chance to teach me about the tools and how to apply them. In many ways it seems to me now that I didn't learn how to apply myself at all. Especially not in what I considered to be traditionally masculine terms. Many of my close friends have some experience with carpentry or at least know how to use tools, since they have done some engineering studies or apprenticeships. When they first saw what was laying dormant in my basement, they were quite astonished. They understood, however, that it was completely lost on me and my soft hands. I am not used to that kind of work. 

As my brother moved out years ago and later into his second or third home, every once in a while, some tools would disappear and never come back. A hammer, a saw, this and that. The workshop became a strange storage space. An absurd assortment of all kinds of things, ranging from Christmas and Easter decorations to an old camping set, hundreds of compact discs and even the old dog's box and toys to name only a few. Just all kinds of rubbish.

On occasion, my brother or I would feel obligated to do something about the mess, but never wholeheartedly. We would be looking at the state of things, complain about the amount of work that it would take and try and move stuff from one surface to the other to try and create a sense of order where there really was none. All of these attempts failed because neither of us ever committed to making permament changes and to not putting more boxes in there because the space wasn't used properly and because they were in the way. 

Yesterday, I stepped into the workshop and was appalled by the mess that has accumulated over time. I started throwing things that I knew were trash and would never be useful again into a garbage bag and worked myself through some things that I could identify to be somewhat similar, like separating nails from hammers and saws from gloves. It was a really basic idea of order. I knew it wasn't going to be perfect, it couldn't be from the little knowledge I had, but it was a start. One could say it was long overdue, too. 

It is frustrating and overwhelming for me to go in there. To be quite frank, sometimes I feel that in almost every imaginable way I have failed the memory of my father and coming down to the basement and to the workshop especially is the strongest reminder of that which I can immediately conjure. 

I see not what I can do, but everything I can't do while I am in there. I imagine him working and creating things, but I am just really lost in there. Most of the time yesterday I spend crying because I put up a little picture of my father on the wall to honor him in the place that I possibly have the some of the clearest memories of him.

How does this all relate to the outside world? Not everybody has the chance to look away from the mess, like my brother and I did in regards to the workshop. What is happening right now requires attention, commitment, education and fundamental change, amongst many other things. Demandingly so, I must add. It isn't as simple as putting the right nails in one compartment or hammers all next to each other and because it doesn't affect everybody in the same way, so many people don't feel obligated to do something. I am afraid that because people can say it doesn't include me, I am not a racist, I have not hurt anybody, things won't improve like they have to. 

I spend the last week in the hospital. After months of waiting, I received a cornea transplant. The surgery and narcosis took me out quite enormously, I have yet to completely recover my energy and the full rehabilitation of my eye, in terms of interweaving the nerve tissue with my own, will take many years. For a little while, I was robbed of one of my senses, my sight. Additionally, this was my first stationary stay in a hospital and it was an exhausting challenge for me, mentally and physically, even emotionally at times. 

While I was trying to persevere on my own, I learned about what was happening in the USA. Although they are very far away and I have never been there before, I understand that it is a global issue and from a humanitarian standpoint, much like many of my friends, I feel devastated. 

In very abstract terms, death became more so a part of me last week than before. The matter I have received has yet to be accepted as my own and I don't feel like I did last week before the operation. It took the death of somebody and their donation for me to improve my vision. In the meantime, I have done a bit of research on the Norse mythology figure of Odin because I knew that he had lost an eye as well. Apparently, he had gained great wisdom for his sacrifice. I have yet to feel any insights like that, although they may still come. What I have noticed is my obligation as a human being. I know that with each passing day I march closer towards death. I understand my obligation to give back if I may in whatever way I can think of because we are all one and stand together in the end. It feels to me that since I have touched darkness so clearly, I can only see more of it regardless of where I look.