PSYCHOLOGY BUSKING a la wordswords: ALL GOOD THINGS MUST COME TO AN END: BY HOOK OR BY CROOK OR BY THE AMERICAN VOTER

ON PUMPKIN WAY, WASCANA CENTRE

The season of Hallowe’en pumpkins has come to an end, and so has the season of my guitar busking come to an end. I am not a brutto-tempo busker. When those Canadian winds blow cold, my busking is fini until springtime.

Sad? Yes and no.

“All good things must come to an end” (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1374). Like reading the last page of a good book, or like watching the very last episode in a popular television series, good things do end. This I know from personal experience.

In my efflorescence, my academic youth, I was a member of the Time-Life Book Club. Each month a little-known work by a great author, or a great work by a little-known author, arrived in my mailbox. This was the norm for a few years until one day the books just quitting coming. Was I a delinquent account? Nope. Was there a mailing glitch? Nope. Factoid: I had completed the series. Time-Life had run out of books (for me). I had run and read the course. I was stunned.

My wife and I had a weekly ritual of watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show. We did this for years. And then one week, it was gone. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was fini, and we were stunned.

Personally, these examples are cheesy. On a universal scale, too, all good things must come to an end. Things such as relationships in love and life stages come to an end.

All relationships from puppy love ‘til death do us part end. Love is a powerful emotion, and when it ends, figuratively and literally, it is heart breaking. And what becomes of the broken hearted? All the people I know who have had broken hearts move on to break other hearts. Alas, my puppy-love heart ached when it was sayonara to Saffron, sayonara to Fronteen, sayonara to Maria, sayonara to Suzanne et al et al et al. And these are just puppy loves, but even the most loving and endearing and relationships end. All of us succumb, and this includes lifelong lovers. Sad but true, but such is life (and death).

I wish I had a time machine. There are days when I pine for when my kids were little. I remember being a much younger parent, traipsing about with my kids in outdoor minus 30-degree weather, trudging through the snowbanks helping them to deliver their flyers. I remember the walking along the beaches in plus 30-degree summertime weather, just beachcombing and looking for shells. I remember our endless summers together. And then it ended.

MY TIME MACHINE WOULD TAKE ME BACK TO MOMENTS SUCH AS THIS!

My kids are now grown and gone. My two oldest live in British Columbia. My third oldest lives in my city, Regina. And my youngest lives in Asia. Still we gather in summer, though not nearly as for long as those days gone by. I feel lucky to get just a week together to hike, and even luckier, too, to get together for a couple days of beachcombing.

Naturally, at my age existential dread is commonplace. Now, in the winter of my life, I am very aware that I’ve more years behind me than in front, and I worry about that. But my existential dread goes beyond that of egoism. Murmuring, sotto voce, I worry about my adult children. I worry, I worry, I worry. I worry about their relationships. I worry about their physical health. And I even worry about their financial health.

To live is to suffer is the skinny of Zen. Zen suffering means that every moment that one is breathing is an opportunity to suffer, to fret or to worry about something. Suffering ends only upon death.

To specifically suffer over my children is the product of evolutionary psychology, that goes along with loving my children. Evolutionary psychology, our creative design, is oblique. Evolutionary psychology dictates that our only reason for being, is to procreate and continue the species. Suffering over children is an evolutionary safeguard to help keep them safe, so that they, too, can procreate and continue the species.

Yes. My existential dread becomes more conspicuous as I age. Hmmm. Though this does not feel like a good thing for me, I suppose it ought to be catalogued as a good thing for my offspring. Like all things related, this dread will end when I end.

Yes. All good things must come to an end.

Factoid: All good or bad things must come to an end. But whether things are good or whether things are bad is a very subjective call, depending on one's perspective, of course. For Kamala and Tim et al, the good things have come to an end.