The Rearview Mirror ...

how the truth of the past informs a more fertile future.

The pre-dawn Greyhound bus pulled away from the Whitehorse loading area. Very few passengers boarded - this bus was more of a mail run for the Yukon and northern British Columbia. Mario was able to sit right up front, in that seat which allowed him to look straight out the windscreen - no heads or head rests blocking his view of the road unfolding before them on this journey.

All the rearview mirrors, and there were many on a bus this size, were perfectly aligned for the driver’s needs. And all were therefore, by necessity, a bit off kilter for Mario (or anyone but the driver for that matter). For the front-seat passenger they showed a kind of sideways take on where the bus had been. A sideways take on a view of the past.

Very fitting for how Mario was feeling. As the miles passed by in those off-kilter mirrors, his mind didn’t connect at all with where he was going: back to Ontario to finish his studies. Rather, his mind was took a sideways view at the past 12 months. He remembered so clearly a girl who served him in the restaurant his first week there, “Cassandra”, her name tag said. The girl he asked out before he had even paid his bill.

From the beginning she was really a friend and partner - in crime, in adventures, in truth-telling and hope-confiding, even in solitudes. A true partner, not seeking power over him, but seeing eye to eye, rationale to rationale, soul to soul. This way of not seeking power over him disarmed him.

He found himself sharing things he never shared with anyone else: his passions for a different world. Funny thing was is hopes for a different world did not seem naïve or grandiose in the light of their friendship. In that well lit place, all hopes were possible. What love it is that forms the fertile ground for hope. Thats just the way things were with them for those months they had had together.

“The world simply can’t continue to sustain the way human beings live. The world as a whole needs to stop having babies upon babies and we need to stop living with such rabid individuality. Return to community living is the key to building a sustainable future.” He could say things like this to Cassie and not feel like he was being ridiculously hopeful.

Not feel like he was standing on a soap box, or people might turn away - for fear of him handing them a tract. Or fear of being asked to join a cult whose sacrament was a laughable anticipation of a communion of all people (good and bad, all saints) and a life everlasting.

With her, he could be full of hope. Presenting that kind of hopefulness required a fertile ground. She gave ridiculous hope the fertile ground to land and germinate.

What was the peculiar alchemy of this fertile ground she presented to him? It was the same thing she presented to most everyone. She presented her full self. She held nothing back, nothing in reserve, as a means of encouraging anyone to love her for anyone but the Cassie she really was. There was no guile. She had nothing to hide, so he need not hide anything from her.

“I like the idea of having babies upon babies. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up in a family the way you did.”

She offered the reason, not as a rationalization or to excuse her difference of opinion, but simply as a matter of fact: a truth. A presentation of truth, even if it was another truth entirely. She witnessed to the possibility of different truths being painted on one canvas: with each brush-stroke on the canvas, they filled in the truths of who both of them were, and who they hoped to be, and how they hoped the world would turn out.

Somehow she showed him that it was absolutely beautiful to present the fullness of who he was, and know it could be received. Without anyone’s personhood being compromised.

She soon became his Cassie, the one he looked forward to seeing each day, the one to whom he told his stories, dreams and what regrets he had managed to stockpile in his young adult life.

Now he was leaving her behind, a fading image in that off-kilter rear-view mirror, meant to make sense of the journey past, not for him, but for someone else. Someone else who was driving a bus, but not driving Mario’s life, after all. The thing is sometimes we look into an off-kilter mirror and think something is wrong with us, with our lives, rather than recognizing that damn mirror is set perfectly right: for someone else - for their life. And as such, it will never show me the right rear view scene for you. Or vice versa.

Each one of us will have our own rear-view mirror. Our own scene and take on that which is past. And it’s pretty magical when you find those whose views from their mirrors connect, by some miracle of the heavens, with the view in your own rear view mirror. And nobody is off-kilter, and both pasts remain intact and coherent, and nobody has to change who they were in order to live fully into who they are going to be.

Mario, a few years older than Cassie, had been in a number of relationships - some more serious than others. He could not picture a life with any of the others though. Cassie alone was a partner with whom he imagined a future, a growing old together.

And he was leaving her behind. To pursue what he felt was the future meant for him. The future that would connect his education with a vocation or at a minimum an occupation, and would allow for him to provide himself a life. The future that connected somehow with an off-kilter past which he was leaving behind.

Even as the miles accrued between them, Mario realized his truth had become elastic, somehow it had stretched beyond the limits it knew before he met her. Now there were different truths he could consider. Because he hadn’t been made to lay down his own truths. The world was big enough for both having babies and being sustainable. These truths could co-exist, like so many other truths could co-exist, once the rear view mirror was given enough distance for perspective.

But Mario wouldn’t arrive at that milepost until he was in first year of grad school, and his undergrad girlfriend Joanie, a lovely, kind young woman, whom he had been seeing for over two years, became pregnant.

By then his truth had become elastic enough for this mistaken catch to become a beautiful new hope. His truth had become, in the fertile ground it had found, so much more abundant in possibility, and so much possible of receiving abundance. Cassie had given him that.

Thats the thing about fertile ground. It can be catching. It abundantly gives. It begets abundance.

And so many different varieties of truths can grow on fertile ground.

On the day their daughter, Charlotte, was born, Joanie was so thankful for Mario’s love. Mario in turn was thankful that Cassie’s provision of a fertile ground had allowed him to enjoy the love that was present in the expanded truth he now occupied: as a father and a husband. Cassie had made it possible for him to receive this abundance.

Simply by being the fertile ground in a receding rear view mirror. In which seeds were sown, which would bear abundantly in both of their futures.

Photos by imso gabriel on Unsplash