Heroes Not Zombies

The Fushimi Inari temple just outside Kyoto is quite unlike any other place I’ve visited. It’s an experience which was unique and which remains vivid in my psyche many years later. You follow a path through a forest, up a hill until you get to the top. The path has hundreds of these “Torii” gates enclosing much of it.

You’ve probably seen photos of these types of brightly coloured gateways from Japan. I think they are amazing. They are simple, beautiful and magical.

As you walk up the path you pass under one gate after another, and it never becomes “same-y”. It seems that you can experience the uniqueness of each gate, one at a time, and, of course, if you stop, look ahead, turn round and look back, then you see these long snaking tunnels…..because although the gates are clearly separate from each other, as you look at a number of them extending into the distance, the spaces disappear and they seem to form a continuous arch.

Maybe the closest thing to this in Europe would be a cloister with multiple arches, but, even that is not quite the same.

If I stand here and look back, I see a trail of events and experiences represented by each of the gates. Each event was unique, every experience changed me. Some of them stand out in my memory and I can see them clearly, others have fused with the ones around them to create a longer period of my life which I remember with only some representative details.

If I stand here and look forward, I see a cascade of events and experiences lying before me. Not fully formed, and not realised until I reach that point in my path. The ones closer to me lie in my immediate future and I see them fairly clearly. The further out ones are hard to distinguish, hard to know in their details.

Both of those orientations seem right to me. Both of them influence and inform the point where I have reached, the present time and place, under this one torii gate we call this moment.

As I reflect on my life this way, I realise that every event has its unique context, every experience comes into being as I live it, and transforms me, and my life. I realise I can’t see very far into the future, that the future is not lying fully formed ahead of me, but that some aspects of the future are already in place, waiting to create my next, singular, and special experiences of what will become “now” when I reach them.

I can reflect on the larger scale this way too, looking back over the last 18 months of this pandemic, remembering some of the events which changed me, and straining to look ahead, having, yet again, that feeling of uncertainty, of doubt, and wonder……knowing that none of us know, but that we have a pretty good idea of how the near future will look, all the same.

Perhaps this is not the most creative way to think about the past and the future, but I like it. It brings together the connectedness of events and experiences. It reminds me how every one of them changes me. And it reinforces my understanding that I need to be humble, flexible, and adaptable, responding to each gate as I reach it.