Bygone Days Are Forever ✨

(For added effect, listen to this while your read)

Hey you! Do you ever just get smacked by a phat wave of nostalgia that drags you under into a different time and then spits you back out with a bunch of feelings?

I’ve been reminiscing pretty hard as of late — dunno what’s up with my subconscious but it’s been sending me visitors from the deep archives. These memories are incredibly compelling. Vivid enough to give me a “full-body” immersive experience. You know, like when you catch a whiff of that stray, but keenly familiar aroma and it just punches you in the memory-gut!

Unlocking you like a soul-key. 

And it’s just so amazing to see how far these bygone days have receded, shrinking into the distance. 

It's a peculiar sensation, isn’t it, precious? (sorry, been reading a lot of LOTR lately). These past epochs of my life, don't just feel distant — they sometimes feel almost alien. A different reality. A different life. A different person. Yet indescribably intimate, like pages from a novel I read long ago.

To the exception of what treasures may yet lie buried in my subconscious, for the most part, it seems these memories will continue to fade as time goes on its relentless stroll. Distilling into some impressionist-type artwork at the back of my mind. Dissolving into my Being. 

And this kinda makes me sad… these recollections are always accompanied by a sense of grief. 

It’s only natural, I suppose.

However, what I find really peculiar is how, besides the nostalgia, there is also a sense that those moments were somehow “less true” than my life now… It’s hard to explain. So bear with me, damn it!

More often than not, we tend to understand our past as part of a greater, overarching narrative leading up to… something. A something that is somehow more real — more ‘legit’. Looking back at childhood memories, it seems second nature to ask: “what was that moment for?” As if the events that have passed have been gradually building up-to the present.

Take, for example, a core memory of a time when you were playing your favorite game with your very best friend — who is no longer your friend. Not even an acquaintance... It seems easy to slip into thinking “what was the point of that?”.

We make sense of ourselves teleologically and mythologically. In this view, every moment of our past is a frame of an ongoing movie. Just a stepping stone towards the real thing. Towards ‘the moment of truth’ – a punchline, maybe?

Of course, we can understand all of these past experiences as crucial to the development of who we are today — after all, the only way to “connect the dots”, as Steve Jobs might say, is by looking back. And there is certainly truth to this interpretation. 

Yet, as you know, in life there are many truths. There are other ways of Understanding. Other, often neglected, perspectives (like the quiet kid at the back of the classroom who has wonderful ideas if only one would ask).

I don't usually like relying on 'quantum analogies', so take this with a grain of salt, but kinda sorta like the wave-particle duality in physics, we can also understand each moment of our lives in two seemingly contradictory ways. We can view our lives both as a coherent wave – a continuous flow of experiences that form our life story – and as distinct particles – discrete moments, each complete and significant in its own right.

Each moment is, after all, absolutely unique, and for the time that it is — it’s all that there is. 

In other words: Have you ever lived your life — this life — before? Each moment contains the unyielding Mystery. Every second cradles the divine secret. Pregnant with existence, with potential, with infinite understanding. 

In this view, every moment has been a gift. An instance of the cosmos experiencing itself as a Self; an expression of totality as a particular time, place and activity. 

We can take a frame from this movie and admire it for its very own sake and hang it up on our favorite wall while we sip champagne to Frank Sinatra (if you’re into that sort of thing).

Now.

This whole thing really comes to a fore when we take into account our smiling friend across the room: Death.

And, not just the abstract concept. Rather, the impending reality in everyone’s lives. 

The fact that things could end in the next moment.  

Does this then undermine the meaning of what we've been building in the grand (or not so grand) narratives of our life? Like a giant bully who kicks our sand castle out of sheer spite (cause of abandonment issues or sumthn like that). For it seems we’re never meant to reach these ever receding ideals… Any thought of a neat bookend is just that, a thought.

When the story gets “cut short”, was that life not worth living?

Were all our experiences for naught?

Is the cocoon only a means for the butterfly? Is the butterfly the “goal”? Is she more “true”? For butterflies also perish. Not, of course, before they mate 😏. And the game is played again — is the butterfly, then, only a means for the caterpillar?

So it is for all stages of human life. 

Do we think that, because we didn’t really “know” much as babies, we were somehow living a less truthful existence than now — when we have learned a bunch of new stuff? ‘Acquired’ all these fancy experiences and whatnot.

Thinking that, back then, we were naive and our knowledge of the world was incomplete — Ummm… is our knowledge ever complete?!

Tomorrow we’ll realize how little we knew today — and so on, in this never ending, dialectical movement that is forever becoming. 

I suppose Truth is something that we all seem to be deeply concerned with — we really want to know the way things ‘actually are’ — and to that philosophical endeavor I say: ‘good luck!’👍🏼 (Don't expect a clear resolution any time soon).

My love,

At this precise stage of your life, that is so full of questions and restlessness and ambition… it’s worth noticing that it’s, at the very same time, entirely complete. 

And don’t worry, there’s still much to be done. 

:)

xoxo - Julen