Some weeks ago I took my parents to Musikverein to watch a Mozart concert that could not get any cheesier, clearly staged for tourists who cared more for the interiors than the music (disclaimer: there was no other program in Musikverein during the days when they were in Vienna, and the Oper was in summer break). Still, I had the same sensation as everytime I had to sit inside Musikverein, or in a classical music concert especially one that involves string instruments, for some reason. The helplessness you feel when the world is tumbling down and you have nowhere to hide. Then I had the cheesy realization that you not only cannot change the past, but also have to carry it for as long as you remember it. If you cannot make peace with it then you'd have to carry that not-peace with you. It's part of you. I just have to live with the fact that classical music makes me sad, just as the Jian Guo Men Starbucks makes me sad and ... shit I don't remember all that much, see. I have spent my ration of sadness prodigally.
The past is a part of what you are underneath what you seem to be right now. Like a canvas. When you look at it you see the painting on the surface, perfectly constructed and colored, if you happen to like the construction and coloring. But you don't know what it is underneath, or what it used to be but no longer is yet still part of it. That was the literal presentation of my cheesy realization when it struck me as I was arduously painting over an old unsuccessful painting with white-colored paint, unsuccessfully for a second time. What's hidden is still there. Canvas I can always buy a new one, provided that I have enough money and space, but heart I'd have to keep my own. With its excessive freedom to forget and stubborn resistance to exercise it. You are free because you have the choice for good as well as for bad, for rational as well as for emotional. If you are not exposed to the temptation of the bad then your freedom is incomplete, and partial freedom is no freedom. Burgess wrote: I bought a ticket to Moneta and, on the train, quietened my shaking by pondering the mystique or meteaphysic or theology of war. Was war a natural product of historical wrongs or was it an allegory of some eternal opposition? It seemed to me that good and evil were probably as indefinable as right and wrong, and that the sole reality was the electricity of opposition.... You were doomed to take sides, but did it matter which side you took? And then the words home and duty bellowed from a baby in the next compartment. It probably doesn't matter which side you take, or which guy you marry, for that matter, as long as he brings coffee and omelette or whatever he has for breakfast to your bed occasionally (but the omelette or whatever he makes must be good, that's a matter of principle). I'm always afraid of wasting time, but what if wasting time is part of spending time efficiently. As Matthew Syed said in Black Box Thinking (if I recall correctly), improvement is most of the time incremental. It comes from testing all possibilities, even if they make little sense at the time of testing, and failing. Maybe the only time wasted is that spent on thinking and theorizing. Because it never takes you forward (or backwards) in reality. If you don't know what the perfect way to construct that painting is, simply try it out. Try it out and paint it over if necessary, and then try again. You might say that the true masterpieces are never paintovers. Well I'm trying to make a point here, aren't I?
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