And this of course got me to thinking about the relationship between our “favorites” (people, places, things, etc.) and our identities.
Wellington has a dish named after him, since he was so fond of it. What happens if you one day discover a new favorite, then another?
It seems to me that what matters in every interaction is the extent of our open engagement with it, our openness to experience, and that we enjoy everything NOW, and then move on to what is next. Clearly, we will have recurring patterns. Life is large and chaotic.
But I think it might be useful to regularly change favorites, or at least to explore. The goal is not to destroy enjoyment, but to weaken the clinging part of us which imprisons us in places where happiness and enjoyment are not possible.
And I would add to this some thoughts on Exploring versus Exploiting I learned about in my lecture series on Complexity. To some extent, they are mutually exclusive. In the first case, you are looking for something–say in this case the best Beef Wellington on the planet–and in the second case you are eating it.
You could in theory stop at the first restaurant you find which serves it, and consume theirs forever. This would be a case of more or less pure exploiting.
You could continue to try new versions for the rest of your life and never go to the same place twice. This would be pure exploring.
Very smart people feel–and I must say that the end of all our explorings is still a feeling, that of confidence–that the best solution in at least rugged landscapes is what the call Simulated Annealing, which in my understanding more or less works out to lots of exploring giving way gradually to lots of exploiting. They of course use symbols and shit.
But in a dancing landscape, you can never stop exploring, and life is a dancing landscape. This is something like, say, Hogwarts, which changes over time.
Ponder this: there is a favorite something that will one day be in your life that you have not yet imagined.
My life sometimes feels to me like crawling through a pile of razor blades, being cut at every moment, bleeding and regenerating, and it is very unpleasant. But ideas of some sorts bring me solace and comfort. They reconnect me with beauty. And sometimes, very rarely, I feel light.
There is no doubt in my mind that I am willing to give my life to learn. And it does seem to me that over the long term, perhaps things are a bit like my Assassin’s Creed game: if you keep going, and keep the faith, you never have to traverse exactly the same landscape twice. You cannot lose. You merely encounter delays, perhaps lifelong ones.
And I get this sense I have been on this Earth many times, and I have failed many times. You take your place in the line, and you try to hold it, and you are overwhelmed. You did what you could, but it wasn’t enough. The opposing force was too strong.
But I do believe in reincarnation. I do believe in second and hundredth chances. The evidence for what they used to call metempsychosis is overwhelming. You can’t beat me.