Despite this acknowledgement, I haven't taken to carrying around a little notebook in my back pocket. Nor do I make it a habit to jot things down in my smart phone memo pad. I have yet to utilize the efficiencies of voice notes on the fly and I certainly haven't conscripted a personal assistant to follow me around night and day (though, for the right price...).
My point is that I only infrequently capture the fun ideas (subjectively speaking) in the moment in which they occur to me. My thinking, on the thought, is that if it has occurred to me once, it'll occur to me again. Why stop the train to write something down if the train will swing by there again? I've done some thinking on the origins of this mentality and concluded that this assumption is more than likely derived from a question posed in that infamous core class, Moral Reasoning with Michael Sandel, during which half the freshmen spend their time watching the dark wood of Sander's theater confusedly and the other half dislocate their shoulders trying grasp at the microphone from which they hope to pose the most paralyzing philosophical query ever to be brought to court with aforementioned Sandel. The thought exercise was: if one could return to a moment in their past, having no knowledge of their future or the consequences of their actions, if one could "go back" that is to say, what would one ever be able to change?
The unilateral answer (obviously, because everything philosophical is absolute), after many clarifying questions and the characteristic ping-ponging of inflated vernacular, is: nothing. We predicate every decision on a lifetime of warm-ups. Nothing we do has been untouched by the weight of everything we've done up until the very moment our next decision is solidified. My next sentence will always have followed from my last, no matter how many times I change it, because I will always have been meant to change it up until the very last iteration. In short, no matter how many times we're allowed to go back, without new information - aka, with no knowledge of the future, or of the, presumable, regret or sadness that has prompted a trip to the past in the first place - we are destined to repeat our original actions (decisions). One could even argue, we have no recourse BUT to repeat our original actions.
THAT is the very reason why I always think that no matter what it is that has occurred to me, if it originates organically and is not a response to an idea presented TO me, even if I don't write it down and I forget what it is in the moment, I am bound to eventually be in a similar situation which will prompt a similar neuronal reaction at some point in my future. In sum, if we have, inside of us, all the pieces necessary to create something once, creating it a second time will be easy. Thus, everything blog-worthy is replicable and my resistance to interrupting life to write things down is justified.
Until today. Why? New organically reasoned blog-worthy revelation that indicates I'm a MORON:
The very weighty revelation that has forced a behavioral modification to which everyone is now witness is that even if a blog-able idea is replicable, how fucking blog-worthy will it be if it takes ANOTHER 26 years to fucking occur to me again!?
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1 comment:
Such a deterministic viewpoint! I disagree -- there's too much that's randomly or non-linearly driven in our heads and in our world to assert that the same attributable conditions will lead to the same outcome. There's a butterfly flapping somewhere...
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