l'avenir

It's a slippery slope, living for the future. The farther you get into it, the farther you feel from it, the farther you start reaching. I was inspired by Yeah Dave's guide to livin' the moment when I read it a couple years ago. Reading some of his stuff was like a revelation. There were some obvious things that I remember having heard all my life and I feel would be common sense even if no-one ever told me but there were also some things that I felt brought me to life.
I haven't focused on it so much in the day to day life lately but he recommended to each and every day enjoy: something beautiful, something humorous and something delicious. Within a few months after reading this, I was noticing to myself all that was beautiful, all that was funny and all that was yummy in a day. I often felt proud of this and would even share these things with my friends. Whether that meant sharing the actual experiences or sharing my tales of these experiences pretty much depended on where they were. I remember feeling energized and revitalized. I felt as though I was I doing something good even if I didn't really have a purpose.
It is hard to be happy when you are weighing yourself down with the pressure of having to matter to everyone. To be honest, if you didn't try at all I would be willing to guarantee that you would still matter to at least one person. And it's the people that you matter to without trying that you should be happiest about, should be closest to, should try to matter for.
It takes a really decent person to care about and care for other people. I don't mean to just care about and for your family- that usually comes naturally. And I don't just mean someone who does things for others. A lot of people do things for others just for the gratitude. Some don't help others out for others' sake. Some people do it for some sort of self gratification in the end. It's the people who just do it because they see a problem out there and they hope for a better ending. The people that share concern for the future of not just themselves but of others.
That got off on a tangent. I was talking about the future so I guess that was coming back but still. What I am trying to say is that I am finding it very hard to live in the now.
In interviews, people like to ask where you see yourself in five years. It completely freaks me out that I have absolutely no idea. It freaks me out thinking that if I were to instantly jump five years into the future, it would be like waking up an amnesiac with no idea of how I got there. I don't know where I'm going and I don't know what I'm doing to get there...

la vie en film

I've been thinking for a while now, maybe a couple years or so, about trying to pinpoint beautiful experiences and trying to capture them in memory and trying to pass them on to the world. In sketches. In stories. In some sort of artistic expression. I have been searching for the right blend of experiences and related descriptions to deem worthy of one's reading. Years later, I am ashamed to admit that I have realized or perhaps been convinced that even the best of descriptions for the best of moments are still just copies of copies.
Thank you Chuck Palahniuk for taking my beauty, my insight, my loves, my memories straight out of my hippocampus and throwing them all into the metaphorical trash. Nothing that has happened to me hasn't happened to everyone else. No experience is unique.
I think back to the time when a boyfriend of mine would surprise me by dancing to nothing but the beat of our own footsteps. At the moment, I was mystified and surprised. I was so sure that the story of our love could be summed up in the few short minutes we spent closer to each other than the rest of the world had ever been. Closer to each other than anyone in the rest of the world could ever try to be. It made me feel beautiful and unique. Loved and special enough to spend the time and spontaneity on. And then I saw the same scene re-enacted for the world to see in a movie. Only it was different characters and it was in the middle of a road somewhere. And you could see her smile and you could see the passion in his eyes. And, although they were dancing to silence, there was a soundtrack for us to hear because it was after-all a movie.
The thing about movies though, is that you can see all the characters and even when the characters have a flashback, the scene includes all of them even the one whose mind is supposedly having the flashback. You get to see just how beautiful, just how in love all of the characters are/were. You get to see how the love in their eyes makes them that much more beautiful for just that moment. But the thing about real life is you are never going to be able to see what everyone else sees in the way that you feel. The love you held in your eyes only counts to the one who saw it and it only counts for that moment. You can never recreate that beauty or that moment because you couldn't see it from all angles.
And why would you want to? We say we want special and unique experiences but we're addicted to happiness the way a masochist is addicted to suffering. After having that one glorified, defining moment we can't wait for the next to come along. After all, if we were only due that one glorified, defining moment, what reason would we have to live for after it? So we try again.
We keep dancing in the silence hoping to feel that passion, hoping to recreate that moment. Little do we realize that the moment was 'special' because it was spontaneous and unprecedented. But, with the limited creative potential this modern world holds, it is hard, maybe impossible even, to continue creating spontaneous moments so we get sucked in to the hum-drum daily grind of real life. And we start living in movies and books because those copies of copies are unique to us and make us feel alive.