life choices imperfect time moves away

 

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“I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975 / I was puzzled by a dream, stayed with me all day in 1995.”

opening couplet to The State I Am In <Belle & Sebastian>

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“ … the softly creaking door into their sweet, strange, drolly funny and not a little sinister world, where it’s always a backwards-glancing daydream.”

writer in the Guardian about Belle & Sebastian

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    you:

let it go & move on

    me:

<with my fingers tightly curled around a subject, nails buried deep in it>

I Have

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So.

finding themselves as they go backwards forwardI tend to believe we all look back on occasion. Ok. I do not tend to believe. I know we look back incessantly.

Especially on the good stuff.

Ok. Especially on the bad stuff.

Ok. Suffice it to say, good or bad, we backward glance incessantly.

Heck. We are even creative in our backwards looking. It can be after decades, after years, after months, and, yeah, even after minutes.

 

“I always say the perfect words, five minutes after the conversation has ended.”

 

The world we look back at is a sinister little world. Sinister in that the view looking backwards more often than not is rebuilt in our heads to reflect some utopian feeling moment. Sinister in that we view some moment as if we were in control everything or, maybe conversely, the universe had controlled everything to occur at that moment in time <some would call this destiny or fate>.

Simplistically, this means backward glancing has a very uncomfortable relationship with “perfection.”

Yeah. Perfection. This happens because we ‘still’ time <make it stop in our viewing> and this creates a wacky perception that everything was actually still in that moment. Worse? That stillness implies control and alignment.

This is flawed thinking. Flawed because this utopian backwards moment is great conceptually but does not even come close to reflecting the reality.reality persistent one

Why?

Well. Several reasons but let me focus on our imperfection.

What we view backwards looking as perfect is more likely a reflection of our imperfection in the moment <or imperfections in general>.

Let’s maybe call those imperfections “a confluence of uncontrollable factors.” And what makes that idea even worse for us is, well, we hold on to the beautifully imperfect moments with fingernails dug in. To be clear … this can go both toward incredibly good memories and incredibly bad memories. Both reflections of imperfect reality which in the rear view mirror look perfectly aligned with us … or against us.  what I mean by this is that backwards looking is a completely  warped view in our heads.

 

  • The moment is made up of imperfections yet we see it perfectly.
  • The moment is most likely a confluence of uncontrollable factors yet we view all the factors as controllable <or we should have controlled>

 

That said. This means backwards glancing is more often than not grounded in what I often call “if only thinking.”

I coulda, shoulda, woulda things.

Backwards glancing far far <far> too often glances off of several thoughts which can steer our current view in the wrong direction:

  • Not being good at something <or in a moment>
  • Not being good enough <in the moment>
  • Fucking something up <or a moment>
  • Leaving when it got too hard <or leaving in a moment>

Yeah.

As for “if only” we can certainly change ourselves and our circumstances to some extent. I have written about this numerous times. However backwards glancing generates flawed perceptions of change.  It implies “well, if I had done this” or “if I had only been paying attention to” … you would have done the ‘right’ thing <whatever right truly is> and all would have been good.

Flawed thinking.

All that would have guaranteed is a different outcome and  different experience. Neither of which is guaranteed to be the ‘prefect’ scenario you envision.

Look.

I believe that the past can be a great place to learn from. The past offers us the opportunity to see glimpses of who we truly are in a variety of different situations. It does provide some opportunities to gain some valuable self backwards glance where i am going stay here life pathwisdom.

But at the exact same time it takes some fortitude to not let the past dictate your future or even to let the past get in the way of living in the present. Simplistically, backward glancing can freeze you.

Freeze you stuck in the wretched middle of the past, present and future.

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“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been.

 But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.  So she was turned to a pillar of salt.

So it goes.

People aren’t supposed to look back.  I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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In the end.

Here is what I believe most of us learn by looking backwards. Nothing very good. Why? Looking backwards it can seem quite easy to think everything would have explained itself if you had only stopped interrupting. Looking backwards it can be difficult to discern what you should miss and what you shouldn’t miss as well as what you actually missed and what you didn’t miss.

 

“Do you ever catch yourself missing the things that you shouldn’t?  The people you shouldn’t?  Do you find yourself wanting them back but you know that you shouldn’t?

You suddenly remember the million reasons that you shouldn’t want them back in your life but all you can focus on is the one reason you should take them back.”

i think that’s a hard lesson to learn. that it’s okay to miss something but not get it back

/// the-homie-sexual

 

 Unfortunately Life is not so easily explained. I can pretty much promise you one thing … you missed some things you shouldn’t have, you miss some things you shouldn’t and you didn’t miss some things you should have and you don’t miss some things which you should miss.

universe backwards imagination watchBack in 2013 I wrote about how most people either get trapped in past or trapped in the future as they live Life. I called it ‘forward without looking over your shoulder. Life is tricky. Always has been and always will. And both the past has its attractiveness <learning> as well as the future <possibilities>. And there is only balance and not perfection.

And maybe that is the thought of the day.

In the end if all we try is to make this life perfect we will fail and make ourselves miserable in the process. And backwards glancing is a key components to making ourselves miserable.

 

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Written by Bruce