An Answer of Sorts
poiesia wrote: "Now, I don't mean to diminish or suggest that happiness in the present moment in all of this or in life is not real. Yet, in our particular situations, I'd honestly ask you: How often are we enamored of the moment in all of this, fully alive and senses bursting? How thrilling and heady pleasure is -- and we are made fully alive by it. How often are we fully convinced that in the present moment, what our senses, heart and minds tell us is tangible truth that will sustain? Yet, as we look back a year later...it isn't the same experience and the moment is malleable to reinterpretation. I ask you to refute that."
Refute? Maybe I can't. But how essential is the question? How imperative is it to wait until the end to dictate the importance of the event, the feeling? We are not defined in retrospect, but in the moment; we are not always allowed hindsight to process, learn, or categorize. Perhaps it is my issue that there could be a specific truth to be derived from all experience and that we get in the way of our truth by accepting it too early or too late?
Love, and how it defines us, does not wait until it has soured and bittered, has become academic and stalwart with age. The softness and intimacy, the beauty of surprise all experienced in the moment and then gone -- or not -- but lessened with time and with rationalization. I cannot accept that it is only later, without emotion, that I can really gather the truth from my experience, because the experience contained the emotion, was shaped by it.
They are not mutally exclusive, the now and later. Much wisdom, elaboration, smoothing of contours and enhancing of subtleties occurs with time, are integral to a full experience, but to negate the present as compromised, as unfinished, denies its essential, dewy-new presence, its presents.
Am I being too philosophical? Perhaps I am.
I don't want to play the waiting game. I've lived it far too long. My truths are not an epilogue for someone else. They are mine in the moment and I have to proceed with them just that way. The lessons of the past can surface in this luxury we call hindsight, but the descisions in the present are not, and cannot, be removed from my open bracket timeline. Never one place, always moving forward, because unlike our mind's time, there is only forward for us.
Are you correct? Should I be wary of cyclical lessons? Yes, very much yes for me. But can I afford to wait until tomorrow forever to be sure I made the right choice, that I have seen the truth? No. Not anymore. I have lost far to many yesterdays that way.
posted by macaroon at 8:47 AM
9 Comments:
No, you are not being to philosophical and I couldn't have put that any more eloquent but I could almost sware to a conversation in this regard, maybe in another place in another time outside mine, or even your reality but surely in the moment itself. It should feel pretty good but I could be mistaken, and if I am I'm confident you will let me know...
Blu
Wow, that was so...wow, VERY well written.
peeks out from your pocket and like totally agrees with you,as usual
There are so many things you've said that I want to keep, hold in front of me and wave,"See! This is what I mean. Lola gets it." Beautiful.
Well, it's obvious to many your writing skills but we are missing the wonderfully frank and true to time responses, hmmmm?
Okay, reponses. Let's see then. First, I am pleased that so many of you share my thoughts on this idea...I'm sure there's something to be said for the blind leading the blind, but it's good to know, I'm surrounded by simultaneously supportive and like-minnded peers.
Blu, as far as I know, no such conversation in your reality or mine has occured of this nature as far as I know. I'm sure you'll enlighten me though, if I have forgotten one of your many poignant emails. :)
Bobbygondo, thanks, and I went, I supported. I need more instruction...perhaps if there was something for me to sign...I'm always signing things arbitrarily. Couldn't hurt.
Thanks, Jerk and Anon-dee-mous...been thinking of both of you actually.
And Meredith. Good. I hope I do. Thanks for sending the love. Grin.
In my headspace written on my blog, I don't believe that I've negated the idea that the present moment is valuable. My only momentary pondering was that there is great relevance in hindsight. Don't make more of the comment than needs be.
The idea of hindsight being 20/20 is quite simple. In the moment, we are always sure we made the right choice. We are lifted up by the surety of making those choices at the time they happened.
However, sometimes, when we look back on the past choices, we see things in hindsight that make the "original" moment malleable to re-interpretation. Hence, my comment on revisionism.
This is not to be confused with regret.
Also, this was more of my vague way to state that one's reality can be manipulated. You just don't see it until much later -- hence, perfect hindsight.
I still maintain that the present moment can be open to reinterpretation, that reality is fluid and malleable. We claim what we want at the time it happens. Simple. We can't do anything else.
If I wanted to get philosophical, the relevance of time (past, present, future)would be the primary enemy, wouldn't you say?
Regarding the waiting game...are you still where you were a year ago? Situation unchanged? Thinking unchanged? Essentially doing and saying all the same things? Waiting?
Most would agree that they aren't doing the same things, in a holding pattern. :)
Correction:
I meant to use the pronoun "we"
Regarding the waiting game...are we still where you were a year ago? Situation unchanged? Thinking unchanged? Essentially doing and saying all the same things? Waiting?
I don't think so.
Most would agree that they aren't doing the same things, in a holding pattern. :)
Actually, now that I think about it, time being a manmade construct, there is a belief that all things, past/present/future are all occurring at the same time.
Thanks for an intriguing interchange, I missed talking to you. :)
P.S. My apologies for being outside the echo chamber.
I wasn't actually thinking that this was a black/white issue, and semantical arguments on the rise and fall of context hopefully doesn't negate the validity of both sides (sides?!) to the dialogue.
No, of course. I realize that there was a brevity and rhetorical-nature to the comment. Really, I was more musing, thinking about what you said, where I am.
Am I doing the same thing? Actually, sometimes I think that I am. In fact, my mom keeps shoving the following wisdom down my throat:
The world will keep giving you the same lesson until you learn it, lola.
I appreciate your response, and I too have missed our interactions. I realize that it seems otherwise, but really, I am in a place right now where too much clarity is going to kill me. And I have a hard time elluding you, who knows nearly the whole story of my current woes, who truly can empathisize, and so, I stay away. It isn't forever. It might not even be for long, but it's that same pattern of holding off the inevitable.
In any case, I am thinking about you fondly,
lola
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