Full Circle

The past is a dangerous thing to think about, especially in times of crisis. While looking to the past is always important for the potential wealth of lessons to be mined, it also tempts the mind to retreat back into an inner shell of deluded visions hazily thought of as "the way things were". But history is only as good as the person reconstructing it.

For example, I can think back to a definite time in my life where I knew there were people in whom I was confident I could trust my life, and my most important thoughts and feelings. In this time, I remember that I was confident in who I was, and what I had accomplished. I could look at the sum total of what I was doing and say, yes, I did this, and I can be proud of that.

And right now, I feel like I haven't any of that at all.

Of course, if you went back in a time machine, you'd notice that things wouldn't be quite so rosy as I'd thought, and if you'd followed me around you would have seen me at some of the worst points in my life - my little disaster with Catherine at VCF for instance, the failed 2nd year Calculus mid-term with my classmate rubbing said failure in my face, my angry blow-ups against Sidrah and Katherine. And yet, all of that gets washed away in the wave of even more times of sadness: the loss of a father, of a lover, and all of the things that come with such loss.

It strikes me that maybe, all of this sadness will get washed away with something even worse in my future, and I'll sit somewhere, thinking, "Wow, I wish I were back in Fredericton again..." when the little joke in all of that is that in the end, my net level of lonliness and isolation won't be any higher than it would have been when I was in Fredericton, which wouldn't have been any higher than it would have been when I was in Toronto. It is all ultimately, up to our perception. So I find myself struggling to find some piece of tangible evidence that yes, things were better in the past, compared to how shitty things seem now. When all you have is the shifting vagrancy of memory though, sorting out the fact from the romanticized myth becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, and any exercise to converge towards the truth becomes an asymptotic curve where you get closer and closer towards fact, but in the end, you never, ever truly attain it. Like the limit of a function.

Limits of functions however, are important components of the equations in which they serve. They contribute to a greater solution. Our exercises in futility, be they material or mnemonic, may immediately lead us nowhere, but for the sake of our sanity we must remember that they are another step towards something better.