Here it is: you can’t capture anything. Whatever has been, was, and remains only in your memory. Whatever will be, isn’t yet. The expectation of an experience is not the experience, and removes all possibility of something genuinely new.
For me, I feel things freeing up, but last night in my dreams I felt some part of me trying to hold on, to get stuck in a middle I knew, rather than an ending I have never experienced. And every moment is an ending, is it not? There it was, now it isn’t. You will never get that back.
They say “capture the moment”, but what I feel lasts is the process by which you surf the moment. Surfing, as I know I have said, is an excellent metaphor. You are responsible for your balance, for being out on the ocean, for setting a rough line one way or the other, but much of what happens is in the ocean, is beyond your direct control. Even the best surfers don’t have great runs every time, and they can’t move at all without waves.
Feeling is the energy of the waves. It is what makes interesting things possible. It is why you have to free feeling, but it is the unpleasant fact for many of us that we spent many years learning how to lock feelings away, so we could wander around with our fake smiles, lies we tell ourselves, and to operate in our mechanical, inhuman, inhumane world, without singing and dancing that we share easily or often. Most Americans need to be drunk to do either.
Life, in some respects, is an endless succession of rooms. Ponder the early Buddhists, or the Hindu Sanyassin, moving around, homeless, carrying their homes in their hearts and sacred texts. You can’t live in one room forever. Me, I counted once the number of places I have lived at least 3 months, and it is something like 25.
But feeling stays. There is a way of being with yourself that is comforting, loving, calming, enlightening. You can start a slow, small, steady process of learning to live, and learning to love life, and with it everyone else. You don’t start with loving others. That is impossible. It is, for most people, a lie, and quite often one which conceals a fundamental manipulativeness. You have to love life first. You have to love yourself first. Only then can you be trusted.
I need people so much I sometimes have to avoid them. It is a sad fact that sometimes the loneliest among us are destined to remain lonely, because your very need makes you toxic. I want to figuratively eat people, to consume them, to get their love and feeling and understanding, because I am emotionally starving. This makes me dangerous.
So I walk a lonely road. It is slowly getting better, though. I have had the courage to see in the darkness, to speak the truth to myself, to see who and how I am. I do not feel there is ANYTHING left hiding. It is not all healed and dealt with, but who I am is on the table in full. This means I can see it when unhealthy processes start. They can’t hide from me.
And for most people, capturing, consuming a time, and staying there, really means to find a way to live in one room, while keeping everything bad you don’t want to see locked in a closet. You can’t move out of that room while all that stuff is in there, but at the same time, you don’t have to go through the pain of seeing it either.
Most people get stuck somewhere. They get stuck in habits which are good enough, emotional attitudes that are good enough, and they slowly age without seeing or learning very much, until there is a shock. I am sympathetic to this. I understand it. It is simply the case for me that my stuff would not fit in a closet, and kept spilling out continually. Dealing with it was unavoidable. Had I not, I would likely be dead now, and am lucky even so that I have survived all these years.