Change has been on my mind lately
Having finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, I can't help but seek patterns where time behaves cyclically. I think about the seasons, how since February this year this new place and environment has changed so much in these months. Clouds, even now, are coming and going without any sense of direction or purpose that I can know. I'm thinking also about nostalgia and how in the face of impermanence, some things from the past seem to be unchanged, eternal even, although maybe that's just cherry picking the unchanged aspects of changing things. The book might point out this exact duality to me and that's why I'm thinking about it so much.
As I reopened this website today to start a blog, something I've been meaning to do for some time now, I found I had actually already done this 8 years ago.
Like finding your old iPod touch notes app intact with the scrawlings of your young self, Blogger faithfully preserved 3 short and illuminating if not frightening accounts of my life in 2012. They included an over detailed rendition of my first relationship, the somewhat troubled reconciliation, and even a journal entry like account which really shocked me.
Like finding your old iPod touch notes app intact with the scrawlings of your young self, Blogger faithfully preserved 3 short and illuminating if not frightening accounts of my life in 2012. They included an over detailed rendition of my first relationship, the somewhat troubled reconciliation, and even a journal entry like account which really shocked me.
In a rather depressed sounding voice I wrote about a morning back in 2012, and included a direct quote from Amy regarding what seemed like a little fight.
I don't plan on deleting these posts, although I was shocked to find them published and with a handful of "views". I've made them private, and hope to keep them, and therefore won't include the quote here. Needless to say, it is appalling, mean, and sad. It reminded me how much has changed, and what hasn't, and reaffirmed many feelings in a way that almost makes me feel like I'm being dragged back into nostalgia in a bad way, as if I am, like the Buendia family, somehow doomed to repeat or commit sins predicted in sanskrit a century in advance.
I don't plan on deleting these posts, although I was shocked to find them published and with a handful of "views". I've made them private, and hope to keep them, and therefore won't include the quote here. Needless to say, it is appalling, mean, and sad. It reminded me how much has changed, and what hasn't, and reaffirmed many feelings in a way that almost makes me feel like I'm being dragged back into nostalgia in a bad way, as if I am, like the Buendia family, somehow doomed to repeat or commit sins predicted in sanskrit a century in advance.
At the same time, as I think about clouds and the melting of the ice and blooming of the flowers, I can't help but feel faithful that the inevitability of change and the persistence of change itself must be a stronger force of liberation than that of nostalgia. Evidence of great change is all around me, and is more obvious than the feelings of nostalgia, and are more deserving of my attention.
I also took the time today to finally listen to an album released in 2017 which I had in 2012 long awaited and hoped for. Back then, Fleet Foxes was a huge important part of my life, that music had and continues to have an impact on my life, but in the last several years I have lost touch with both listening to that music and in some ways, what that music meant to me then. It's as if the part of my it used to live in has been annexed, and I have to peer at it through the windows.
Listening to Crack-Up was a nostalgic experience which I wasn't able to have in 2017 when life and everything seemed so loud and full. I remember trying to listen to it with mock excitement, having not known about its release until it was already out. A friend mentioned it to me, and I realized in the years waiting for the album I had forgotten to wait, forgotten to be excited and keep my eyes peeled for it. I had lost the sense of anticipation and my attachment to it.
I remember trying to listen to it in 2017 as if I was in a loud car with the windows down, I think it was in fact, over a bluetooth speaker with someone who I never used to listen to Fleet Foxes with, and the experience just wasn't the same.
Listening to it again now, I felt like I had time to appreciate it how I wanted to then, and experience the nostalgia with the new sense of perpetual change that this moment deserves.
Most importantly, I found that this album was really good, a continuation and maturity in the evolution of the band that I wasn't able to predict, or hope for, or expect. It feels like even when Helplessness Blues came out this record was destined to exist as well, and I was only destined to enjoy it today, for whatever reason, amidst a confluence of time and events each perceived on different scales and with different feelings.
Most importantly, I found that this album was really good, a continuation and maturity in the evolution of the band that I wasn't able to predict, or hope for, or expect. It feels like even when Helplessness Blues came out this record was destined to exist as well, and I was only destined to enjoy it today, for whatever reason, amidst a confluence of time and events each perceived on different scales and with different feelings.
It feels good to recognise this flow of events and feelings for what they are as time goes. For now, that's all I need to know.
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