By Jarret Liotta

“Because the past is just a goodbye … And you, of tender years, can’t know the fears that your elders grew by.”

Graham Nash

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

WESTPORT — Each week I seem to be drawn into yet another sad sighing bout of solemnity relating to our changing, stranging, ever re-arranging town, egged on by other longtime local yokels like me, itching to reminisce the past, revile the present, and reject the ominous dreads that promise to reconstruct our Westport future.

It’s a comfortable song I slip into singing — sentimental opining on our town’s grand past and precarious present. “O why o why have things changed so-so?!”

And yet as I continue to huddle under my emotional umbrella, cowering from the frantic pitter-patter threats and raining rants and related righteous rejoinders spattering down upon my aching head in relation to racism, education, parental power strokes and the like, I’m reminded how a failure to accept and — ideally — embrace change keeps people in their singular turmoil … and, humorously enough, it doesn’t stop the change from occurring anyway.

Past Clinging

It’s a principal problem that some of us cling too tightly to the past. It’s something we know. It’s warm and familiar, like a dirty diaper, and we rejoice in the safe comfort of sitting in it. We fear change with such a monumental dread that at the worst of times we’re even willing to allow — and even foster — ugliness because we see it as a threat to our precarious comfort — that familiar dirty diaper we know to be safe stability and something we can still call home.

Our fear-based clutching, of course, comes from a place of want. Fear whispers in our ear that there isn’t enough to go around, so we had better act fast and decisively, or we’ll lose what we cling to … That’s what change means to us. And the fear of that change urges us to take desperate action as the threats of new, foreign seemingly unsafe things loom like terrifying monsters over our paranoid shoulder.

To avoid that discomfort, to try and avert it, we’ll do anything to attempt to quell or kill change based on our misguided fear — clawing like wild animals, acting out in desperate fury, like those memorable blind caricatures inhabiting Twilight Zone episodes — fighting their best friends to get into their bomb shelter, or bludgeoning their neighbors because they think they’re actually aliens from outer space.

Control Flinging

Another problem is people who strive so blindly to augment changes that their means & methods start to trump the very principles and picture they’re trying to create. Wired by visions of injustice, for instance, we seek to control outcomes at all costs. We believe in change as a potential positive, but we’ve lost sight of the process and simply want to go to whatever lengths necessary to achieve our version of change for the best.

We’re driven by fear as well. For us the fear taunts our comfort and creates abominable shadows of ugliness and pain that we need to quell or kill before our worst nightmares come to pass. But we’re so blinded by our terrifying discomfort, we lose themselves in a self-righteous pursuit to an end we believe is worthy of justifying any means we decide to employ. We believe in change, but work feverishly to make sure change comes about exactly as we want to see it.

We don’t understand that we’re clinging in a different way as we try to manipulate the fall of the cards, striving to bring the beliefs of others into alignment with our ideal, which likewise is based on an attachment to our past conceptions.

Bowel Singing

Unfortunately we’re not all the same people, for perhaps if our individual manias could cancel each other’s out, there might be some semblance of serenity in store.

Instead we seem to buttress one another’s anxiety & distinct fears, so we must build higher within our madness, and that means more buttressing from the other side, and so on …

In the end it’s all just been about constipating-fear obstructing our bowels, because we don’t trust that we can let it go … that’s there safety in an unknown future … that we don’t need to control it … that there’s plenty to go around for everyone, so we don’t have to oppose change out of fear that we’ll lose …

There’s nothing we’re gonna lose in letting go of our clutching, cloying control …

Here’s wishing us all a hearty, freeing evacuation from the stinky depths of our emotional colon!

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