I'm working on a half-baked theory. Half-baked like an impatient bachelor's pizza pocket in the microwave. You know, kinda doughy and still cool and mushy in the middle. It goes something like this: your past cannot be justified.
Have you ever dwelled on an intense decision you made? Months or years later, the reasoning behind that choice or action begins to crystalize. You find yourself making new discoveries that go something like this: "Oh, so that totally explains why I did that!! How did I not recognize that sooner?!" And it just feels so good to know that you're a self-aware smug little human being that can confidently diagnose their own actions and motivations. So clever.
But how much of that is the genuine uncovering of truth versus an unbridaled exercise in apologetics? You know, when long after this dramatic thing has happened, you make reasoned arguments to justify your actions and behaviours. Fun aside: apologetics are also, like, a solid 85% of the art school experience.
My theory, my thought, is that past a certain point, all you're doing is coming up with reasoning to be at peace with where you are now, and it may or may not actually be connected with what happened all that time ago. It's a mental soother. And yes, some of the things you come up with might be a totally accurate epiphany revealing the mechanics behind your past experience. A big part of it, though, probably isn't.
If our hindsight is just a product of an unsettled mind grasping for straws like a toddler at the McDonald's condiment counter, then that means we can't really trust our own judgement. So how do you accurately explain yourself?
You can't.
The past scenario you're obsessing over was a direct product of the person you were in that space in that time. There is no why. There is just was. That moment was the direct product of all those moments leading up to it, a direct product of a state of simply being. So you can't rationalize it, you can't justify it, it was what it was, and it is no more. You're helpless to change it, so relax and move on with your life already.
This last part has a problem: is poses the suggestion that there is no progression of logic or betterment of the self; if we're simply just in a state of zen-like being, continually married to the eternal now, we can't quite make a conscious change to our behaviours. And judging by exes I've blocked and unfriended on social media, something tells me we have the ability to adapt in some sense or another.
Okay, so if our hindsight can conjure reasoning that is derived from a memory (rather than just understanding what lead to the memory's creation), and if we can simultaneously be a drifting leaf that's blown by life's circumstances while also having some amount of control on where we go next... Where does that leave us? In a mixed up, puddle muck of all of the above.
I think the point I'm slowly arriving at here is that hindsight can't be completely trusted; while it might be logical and hypothetically correct, it could be too far derived from the person you once were. So we look back at those things that haunt us, and for a short time we seek understanding that'll guide us away from similar pitfalls in the future. And then we need to seek forgiveness for our past selves to say, "Yeah, it's alright, you did the best you could in the moment and that's all that could be asked."
To continually dwell on something, as sickly sweet as those refined sugars of manufactured understanding may be, is the pursuit of feelings about feelings, one, two, or three steps removed from truth. And part of that naked truth isn't to be explained, but simply accepted. To keep going and digging deeper for understanding is living in fear of once was and is no more, except by the virtue of your own self-obsessed mind.
Learn from it, forgive anyone and yourself, then live onwards and outwards.
-Cril
Go ahead and throw something
Objects hard to find
The vase is still broken from last time
Have you lost your temper yet?
Where's the romance in watching TV
Where's the future
Stale air will bring a stale me
I'm better off with guitars and paper
And we can't afford the rent
This love's all but spent
I can barely sleep the night
Dreaming about brand new spaces and brand new faces yeah
Dreaming about brand new spaces and brand new faces yeah
Michael Bernard Fitzgerald - Brand New Spaces
