Coda
“So we live… forever saying farewell.” — Rilke
The idea for Emerging Words came when I noticed how in times of transition and change, even single words can be guideposts, teachers, way-showers. I wanted to share and explore some of those words through writing and invite others to, also. As I wrote in the first blog, “words can appear, almost like signals on a dark sea, and unexpectedly shine a light.”
The word I’ve been chewing on for a long time now… “Coda”… is the one that initially inspired Emerging Words. It announced itself one autumnal day as being an apt description of a time of life I needed to pay greater attention to. It still is. With this essay I am trying to listen my way into what is saying.
Coda is both a clearly defined and infinitely mysterious word. In music, it is a few measures added beyond the natural end of a composition. In literature, it can round something out, summarize or conclude it, but in a way that also stands alone. Codas are distinct from what went before, but echo the past work, may even refer back to it. But, they say to me, we are our own chapter, and we only come at the end of something.
In this way, codas are liminal, straddling worlds, designating an ending, but very much their own creative space. As such, they invite dwelling, and wondering: How am I called to shift what I do and how I do it, given the ebbing that codas announce? Is one purpose of “coda time” to give us space to adjust? To grieve? To wait? To give thanks? All of the above?
So many arenas of our lives… work, family, health, our world. So many codas.
But codas are not blunt endings so much as portals. One morning not long ago I had such a strong sense of living in “coda” space and time, and how different it was than other times out of time like hospital or ICU time. Gentler in some ways, but no less stern about having entered a new normal, coda is the essence of fleeting. It is space where light is sharper, loss is imbued and at the same time, there is a honing… a sharper focusing on what remains, what matters most.
For me, now, this sense of a “coda” time of life invites (no, more like demands) I settle into it. Rest in it, listen to it, sense the shape of it, because it comes with its own tasks. And yes, its own joys.
And… because by definition codas do not stand alone… because they explicitly follow something that has gone before… despite being separate they are always looking back… referencing, thanking, adding to. And they come trailing endings, with all the sadness and poignancy therein.
But they do not stop with lament, though they certainly make room for that vital work, especially now. Woven in with the unmistakable endings I am noticing in my life is that quickening, the invitations of any new stage where some practices need to be stopped. New ones need to begin.
Codas ask us… what? To inhabit. To listen to how we are called to do things differently now in some area of our lives. It asks me if I know what time it is.
And in the end, as it were… the subtle or sudden endings codas signal also make way for the next “book,” the next piece of music in our life that is already on its way towards us, that we are already writing. And in some ways that next chapter is already here, because of the ending.
Thus our codas become prefaces to the new book of our days. And, at least for me, it’s never in a tidy way. I find myself standing on various docks, looking for green lights… beating on, a boat “against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (Last line from The Great Gatsby.)
A new friend who is a musician told me that some codas in music have an aspect of refrain; they bring some of the notes from earlier to be a part of the end in a new way. Ah. This, too, speaks of time now. And a sense of wholeness that is forever being revealed.
Thank you for reading, and may the codas in your life be companions on the way.