Turtle Power

I envy anyone who has had a defining moment.

A defining moment, a brush with death, an ensnarement in mortality's web of thorns. I mean the kind of defining moment you do not return from. As "defined," you are exactly what you are from that moment on. Even the worst moments, the horror of war, the most effective detriment to the human psyche. An alienation by violent rapture. The soldiers in Iraq, many of them will return with defining moment intact, and evident upon them in the form of sociopathic inertia and missing parts of their bodies.

I envy their definition. To honorably engage with mortality is something to hang on to, even if lives never advance beyond it. Their purpose has been served, they have etched some kind of impact on the physical world.

A woman who survives breast cancer or an autistic child lost in a forest as deep and dark as its incomprehension, they are defined despite themselves. Whereas animals are defined from birth, from mere seconds of life where survival is a coin flip minute to minute, hour to hour, human beings must seek meaning and purpose in this world, or become as stiff and lifeless as a faded leaf in a stream.

Often, definition is thrust upon us, but sometimes it is not. I believe, in my case, definition missed me, like a speeding truck straddling a turtle in the road. The tires did not crush my shell, nor damage the fragile tissue within. If definition had run me down, I'd have known it. Whatever scars of life I received have been inconsequential, scrapes on the shell caused by the dragging of it all around me.

I prefer the shell, but in many ways remain undefined. To be defined by the shell, to be seen as a part of it or, rather, as the shell itself, an unliving mass, stoic brute matter, is the tragedy.

A turtle never lived who did not crave escape from its shell. I'm sure of it.