the past and the pending

I was sitting in rehearsal this evening during some of the other actors' scenes stressing seriously about my finances when I started thinking about how easy things were in the past. Despite the weight of my constant depression, financially and socially speaking, my life was a much easier game. I started wondering about whether or not I would want to go back there and start making changes that would inevitably affect the me of now, and was split- I would go back and change habits, plans, notions- I would not change or forsake the experiences and the necessity of having lived through those things to grow. I then remembered the last thing I posted about- one of the last things to linger in my mind- the notion that we as humans require a linear timeline for our decisions to have meaning as an integral one. But perhaps my musings are presupposing that I would never know that I could go back until I knew. As my mind started to grow weary of concerning itself with the futile internal discussion about the past and the pending, I picked up my book to, even if just for a few moments, live someone else's anxieties and worries. This is what I came upon:

It is a funny thing, when you imagine yourself returning into the past with the contraband of the present, how weird it would be to encounter there, in unexpected places, the prototypes of today's acquaintances, so young and fresh, who in a kind of lucid lunacy do not recognize you; thus a woman, for instance, whom one loves since yesterday, appears as a young girl, standing practically next to one in a crowded train, while the chance passerby who fifteen years ago asked you the way in the street now works in the same office as you. Among this throng of the past only a dozen or so faces would acquire this anachronistic importance: low cards transfigured by the radiance of the trump. And then how confidently one could... But alas, even when you do happen, in a dream, to make such a return journey, then, at the border of the past your present intellect is completely invalidated, and amid the surroundings of a classrooom hastily assembled by the nightmare's clumsy property man, you again do not know your lesson- with all the forgotten shades of those school throes of old.

-Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev,

Nikolai Gogol's The Gift

Anxiety isn't so much the result of the interaction and reaction of one's many worries, faults, and goings ons- it's its own heavy, gray, sludgy quicksand that sets itself anywhere in your path it feels fit.

If it were merely a bunch of pieces making a whole, I'd tank the pieces until I was free.




I do, in fact, wish I could go back to the good ol' days.