§

“I am seriously perplexed as to why people view the acquisition of greater self-awareness in life a coveted goal to strive for; achieving that objective is a double-edged sword. In its more benign version, such self-awareness allows for a better understanding of certain situations in the past and your then actions. The unintended side effect of those realizations is they can fill you with horror when you surface from the stupor that had blanketed your life until the emergence of this more enlightened self. You stare at the wreckage left behind and have no way of changing anything. Dread fills the space of such helplessness, delivering you to the unsparing wasteland of endless what-ifs that are accompanied by the chilling reality that your past actions cannot be erased; you carry them to the end of your life. 

The remorse over some of your past actions, the echo of which you are able to recapture across the expanse of time that has brought them into focus now, becomes an indelible ink on your entire being. Before long, a moment comes where you think almost with fondness of that period of blissful obliviousness before the dubious prize of higher cognizance settled in. Reaching that highly desired milestone of lucidity in looking at all aspects of your life, both in the past and present, adds a disconcerting layer of bewilderment. Before long, the pressing issue becomes how to exist under the unrelenting gaze of the new discoveries you have made. One approach would be to attempt to shut everything off, including the unintended troublesome feelings aroused in the name of the proverbial saying of questionable value that “life has to move on.” But blocking the unyielding presence of what the subconscious has brought to the surface is more of an abstract, intellectual construct than a feasible endeavor.  There is no such thing as purging the past and the emotions it is capable of stirring. After all, Freud was right: Suppressed emotions never die; they are buried alive, and come back later in life in uglier ways. Still, mental sobriety harbors danger and the price of consciousness leads to piercing pain.

These delayed recognitions have manifested themselves in me on multiple fronts lately: my mortifying behavior that single-handedly shattered the one love affair I’ve experienced in my adult life, a wholesale indifference to my so-called professional achievements, an unmovable abyss facing a person I adore and have limitless devotion to. A single one of these would be enough to have a demoralizing effect on a person’s spirit. The cumulative impact of all three, though, exudes vaguely ominous undertones as to where the second half of my life is headed.

There is also another deeply ingrained parallel concept that people embrace reflexively as a mantra and I happen to view as the epitome of superficiality, which is that time heals everything. While this may often be true, the passage of time also contains another inherently unstable dynamic. It allows for events, people, and actions to be reevaluated under a different, softer light, far from the context of their original emotional intensity. The upsetting impressions that may emerge from such dispassionate revisiting of the past have the potential to negate any intrinsically soothing quality the lapse of time possesses. I think that is why my relationship with the past, which often feels external to me, has always been tenuous, complicated, and thorny. I do have respect for it, even though negotiating its irrepressible, intermittent intrusion into my present life’s higher consciousness is often ruthlessly agonizing.”

Additional Excerpts

“We can never entirely appreciate a person or the importance of an event until some distance has opened from them and they have already slipped into the past. We can process something new we come across in life only through the prism of past experiences and by doing so we fail to appreciate the uniqueness of a situation or of a person we encounter for the first time. A new experience often slides by unappreciated, the potential of its full depth and true value missed altogether because it never had a predecessor to condition us for its arrival. As a result, a profoundly meaningful event will go unrecognized and disappear from the radar screen of our lives like a falling star in the night sky, gone forever with only a soft halo left behind.”

§

“You know, unusual fascinating people are always confusing and destabilizing to others.You think you have met someone who is uncommonly unpretentious, with a different way of looking at things in life, a mind full of that awkward mix of infinite curiosity and jadedness at once, and you consider yourself fortunate at first to have run into such a person, to be sitting next to him, to be intimate with him, just to be talking to him about so many disparate things with such ease. You experience the feeling of coming alive, swept away by his distinctive way of thinking, his peculiar brand of pessimism, his doubts along with sudden bursts of optimism, his intelligently bleak view of the world. You get absorbed by all that, observing yourself being drawn to him against your will. And do you know what comes next? Fear … pervasive fear. Because unusual, fascinating people who can make your heart skip a beat are also unnerving, exactly because they are different and represent the unknown. You can never know what to expect if you give in to the urge to get closer to them.”