philosophuck
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1/18/2009 6:39:46 AM
The things you coulda done. The things you shoulda done.
A lot of people lead relatively simple lives. They go to work 5 days a week and try to relax and recreate during the weekends. They watch their football games or they take a drive to go visit relatives and then the next week is more of the same.
Artists, philosophers, and other people on some kind of edge work on a different time continuum. Some of them do, anyway. They wake up every day with a new little burden on their lap, what to do to carve some new mark of vitality into their skin. Their assessment of their own state of affairs changes even by the hour. The present is an intangible for them because when they're involved in something, the time passes, eventually they look up to see if they've made any progress towards one of their many future dreams. The past is around, mostly to be avoided, but in the halls of confused priorities in their brains, eventually they might peek around some sly corner if they can get away with it and glimpse at what they did with the previous hours, days, months. It might occur to them that every day they woke up with some purpose, however vague, and if they are honest to themselves they evaluate how they spent that time that is now just part of the past. How few of them, meaning the complex people and not the ones who don't have issues like this because they just don't, look at their previous vital time and can celebrate what came then? what came before the new day when they were again determined to head down the path of er, progress?
You might think it inappropriate to mourn what you did yesterday from 3 to 5:30, or what you did in November, but you woke up during those times just as hopeful, and there never seems to be quite enough to show for how you spent your life. You may have a lover and can look back at time together but if you think hard enough, you know you could've been better for that person and it might make you so overwhelmingly sad that you aren't everything you ever should've been. Your parents might be dead and you might think about how your mom had such high hopes for you, they sent you to school, only to have you turn out mediocre even by your own standards, think of all the options you had that you flubbed. people you trusted like you're the most foolish person in the world, the years and years that went by when you coulda done better for yourself and for all the others who had a piece of your life.
Can you think about all that in relation to today? Can you elevate the road in front of you so that when you finally wind down at the end of this calendar day, you can say to yourself you weren't so run-of-the-mill, that you did what you really wanted to do and now you can rest easy and try to do it again tomorrow. Or rather is life meant to be a flow that allows you to forget how short it is? Are the simple people the lucky ones because they don't have to pass their own tests?
I coulda been something. but I will give to those I love.. what I can.
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