When What You Ought to Do Isn't What You're Doing.

Going home isn't always easy. There's an adjustment period. Things have changed, people have altered their lives. Nostalgia gets in the way of the moment, and sometimes you waste time trying to recall moments from a long time ago. Well, maybe not so much a moment, but the feelings you had during those moments that made it feel like home in the first place. This is why people use the tired old phrase "You can't ever go home." Because you can't. And I say you "waste time" because that's what you're doing when you've made choices and then expect for everything to have been frozen in time like a capsule. That's not the way the world, or people, or anything, works. The way things do work is that everything grows and changes and replaces the you-shaped hole that you left behind. And it is chaotic, and illogical, and doesn't really make sense. Trying to make it make sense is silly and just makes you sad, like everyone gets when they feel like they've lost something meaningful. 

These are all things I thought about in the car on the way back from Greensboro. And, you know, I was sad in some ways for the reasons I just mentioned. However, I was also happy because, you know, people and things had grown in strange, interesting, and unfamiliar ways. If I try to tie it in to everything I've been studying, which is a lot about desire and it's inherent creativity, then everything just kept renewing itself in my absence, which I think is pretty wondrous in and of itself. Not, of course, that this would happen despite my going away (which would be unbelievably narcissistic), but that it happens at all, and that I get to experience it in a different way. Because otherwise what good would it be? If we had to reach deep inside ourselves and try at being honest, do we really want it all to be the same? Stagnant? Unchanging? I'd like to think not. 

Which is amazing again because when you're driving, when you're in between places, you're almost in the best place of all. You have the memory and desire of a location in time and space, and you have the same for where you just were, wherever that was. Which means that you get to be in multiple places in multiple times, and if that's your reality then time and change sort of stop mattering. And I know that there's always a lot of talk about the "haunting" of our memory - about how memory is always changing us, how history is always just now. I don't like "haunting" as an adjective because it implies terror and fear. Like we have no agency in the matter, like we're all helplessly in thrall to an unfriendly hall of memories just waiting to carry us backwards into a shadowy underworld. I think this is nonsense at least part of the time. Because if we have memory, are always "making" history, are always using desire to create something new, then we can also manipulate these "middles" to our advantage. To use an overused parallel - if you really deny the spoon's existence then you have agency over it, because thinking is making something so, no matter what fool says that it can't be. So it isn't that memory always "haunts" us, but that we get to have it, and live to construct our whole lives all over again, and have/be/experience something new all at the same time. 

All of which I think is pretty great, and (at least for me) takes the edge off just a little. 

I bid you peace.