Quo Vadimus, or The Long Bridge

Two years ago around this time I had 30 staples in my side after a pair of nasty surgeries.  The day before Thanksgiving I had the staples out.  One of them didn't want to let go - the doc had to twist and tug, and I almost passed out.  Then I rode down a couple floors in the hospital elevator and had a bone marrow biopsy.  A few days later I flew from Nebraska to Washington, D.C. to start chemotherapy at Georgetown University Hospital.  When we landed, my wife and I checked in at our passable extended-stay hotel in Crystal City (Arlington, VA), and went for a walk on the nearby Long Bridge.

I've no idea why it's called the Long Bridge.  It's not especially long.  It runs out past the Reagan Airport runways, along a marshy part of the Potomac where Eagles sometimes circle, fish, and land in the trees.  The Pentagon sits to the left, across I-395.  A glassy, brand-new Boeing facility is set near the start of the bridge, and at the far end is a rise from which one can see the Washington Monument, the Capital building, and much of DC's leafy, northwesterly spread.  As I was beginning chemotherapy, I went for walks out to that elevated end of the bridge, and stared off into the cold late-fall dusk coming down on the city.  And wondered if I would live.

This past Sunday I flew to the Washington, DC area again, and checked in to a hotel very near where we stayed two years ago, during my treatment.  This time I'd come for the final stage of the Foreign Service entrance exams, the Oral Assessment; if I passed, I'd be (almost) a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps.  I passed.

The next morning, having time to kill before my flight out, I walked to the end of the Long Bridge to look again at the unchanging city.  The day was warm and dry.  Waist-high native grasses along the side of the bridge rustled in the breeze, and I reached out to touch their bristled tops with my palms.  I'd lived after all.

The overwhelming sensation on this day, however, was of the same unhurried, inscrutable presence of the eternal that I'd had two years prior, in a much more dire condition.  Though then I'd been supremely vulnerable and now I was (in my small way) triumphant, I was in each case most aware of the ineradicable uncertainty that underpins all human experience - having now achieved a high goal, I no more knew where I was going, what I was doing, what would happen next, or even if I would live much longer, than I had understood those things back in 2012 when I faced cancer.  The through-line of history is precariousness.  Around this axis revolves a cycle of aspiration and despair, conviction and dismay, hope and then ultimate surrender to the unknown.

I am of this human lineage, and I am intimately familiar with these regular orbits of human emotion.  And I cannot resist the too-perfect metaphor of the Long Bridge as the defining vector of my personal uncertainties.  How many times will I stand at its peaceful terminus and ask, invoking God, and my loved ones, and everybody else too, Quo Vadimus?  Where are we going?

If I'm fortunate, many, many more.