Looking back to move forward.

Context of content.It seems a logical precursor to understanding a certain event, argument or theory, not to mention allowing us to explain historical acts in the manner to which they were perpetrated according to social, cultural, temporal, religious, governmental, technological and even environmental values at the time. In other words everything has an underlying series of causes to the effect. The most befuddling and irrational factor in everyone’s life is emotion. Emotion bends and defies the effect of logic’s gravity. It lives in metaphor not actuality.

My heart just dropped. I feel like I am drowning here. My head is in the clouds. Wet behind the ears.

The list is immense and varied and not in most ways a true possibility, but in saying these idioms we do in fact create a greater understanding than if we spoke literally. “Darn, the ingestion of live lepidoptera has caused somewhat of a distressing feel within my intestinal tract that is causing me to become unnaturally nervous!” (Possibly the fear of digesting them shortly!) If I had posed such a thing then a gastronomy and a stomach pump would most likely follow after a rush to the emergency room. But when we figuratively produce the phrase- “I have butterflies in my stomach!” we engender empathy and on occasion sympathy to our predicaments and plights, because metaphor is the expression of emotion.

So for me in the last few weeks it has been with a heavy heart that I have forded several issues of abandonment and loss as well as ongoing trials and tribulations from dear friends whose past relationships have gone south. I would like to help, and as a friend my best defense is to take offense at the things that have happened to them, try to support and cheer them, and wait until there is actually a time where I can do something that may help. Yet in this I feel somewhat hypocritically ill advised towards giving advice, seeing as how hard it is for me to take it myself. I am always the one to hold onto things for too long. I have a jumper that is 20 years old, a Muppet album I was given when I was 10 and box full of the meaningful things that accumulate when a relationship ends. I also cannot honestly say I have stopped wanting things that by definition cannot be, and that is where the illogical becomes emotional. This is where we spin and twist back to the beginning of our moebius strip of metaphor.

This is the great drawback of being an evolved conscious being, we are beholden to our id. We are the ape that learned to create. We are the fish that decided to forgo the majority and choose the land part of Earth. We are the savage, ignorant, willful, and stubborn humanity that created gods to articulate our non-understanding of natural wonders and cosmic constants and then set to war over disparity in agreement. We are the hypocrite that will ask for acceptance but has an awful time giving it.

Yet in this humanity, our greatness lies.

We have defined our beginnings and built monuments to ingenuity. We have produced works of art that stun the senses, and developed words to express everything and anything that can be, and fictionalise what cannot.

We are also the most stubborn creatures towards true love.

We recklessly throw ourselves into bad situations just to feel it again, to hope it remains, returns and stays. I am not a person designed to believe that all is fair in love and war, my morals do stand in the face of my own adversity and personal little tragedies, so all my words, written and spoken, were true and I am very aware of the power that such terms of devotion possess. I made promises that were twisted and torn, I made entreaties that were heartfelt but not proven as permanent as the intent.

So here is to past loves, everybody’s. To those that were held onto for too long and those that should have never been let go. To the words that made forever seem possible and to those that tore such dreams asunder. To knowing time heals all wound but wounds all heals (Proving the truth of the nonlinear reality of time regardless of our mental perception of it.)

But more importantly-

Here is to the definitions we choose to apply. On a world orbiting a sun that was ancient before our pea soup of bacterial evolution began, that we still choose to see as setting and rising each day, we live our lives according to something that can be measured and quoted, borrowed and given, bought and sold, fast and slow, kept and lost. Time is not on our side as one would have it; we all live according to increments, accepting of only the present being real and the constructs of past and future being equally extensions of our memories and imagination. We live, and by that unassailable fact of biological actuality, we make our own lives as we perceive in the same reality, but from our own perspective. No matter how similar we are, each is unique, and each follows according to our individual decisions.

How will your life be lived?