Time and Memory

Just living is proving to be quite difficult, at times. I really miss being a child and not constantly feeling as though I have to second-guess everything both I and everyone else do or think and feel. There is a simple state of just existing, of simply being present in life that seems to leave at around the same time as we become aware of our own essential transience in this world. I wouldn’t ever choose ignorance of the spectacular complexity of this world but I do feel the occasional moment of regret that in growing up, something wonderful was lost. I would give almost anything to be able to return to that simple state of life but the world just doesn’t work that way. Even as the accumulating entropy and material dissolution that differentiates past from future inexorably leads into the counter-intuitive darkness of knowledge and a fictive memory tinged with a wistful sense of loss or sorrow, I think it would be a far worse fate to be entirely ignorant of the actual complexity and richly patterned structure of our world. That is one true cost of living, of aging and of accumulating memory: the ability to just be present in the moment fades and becomes itself (and ironically) just another memory and like all others represents as much a hope for what the past might have been as much as it ever reveals what this now distant, carefree and unbounded happiness and experience actually was.