Chasing Moving Targets

Chasing a moving target gets trickier when the target also keeps changing its form.

I've heard many times that the act of chasing itself is counterproductive, mainly because the more you chase a target, the further it seems to move away from you, as if the universe is conspiring to teach you that desire itself reshapes the object of your pursuit.

The solution that's often given is: let the target come to you, like the typical "build a garden and let the butterflies come fluttering in."

In reality, it's always true that if you build an attractive enough garden, the butterflies will find their way through.

They just can't help themselves in terms of being pulled towards beauty, sustenance, and authentic environments that serve their nature.

This is arguably nature's law of attraction: create something authentic and nourishing, and the world responds.

I've not found any objections here other than the challenge of patience, which is more of a perspective shaped by our modern obsession with instant gratification than a strictly objective fact.

I can build a garden in my backyard and attract a lot of butterflies and still not be able to claim ownership of any single one of them or make them live there as their permanent residence.

As humans, we can start chain reactions, but the progressive journey of that reaction isn't ours to control. A reality that's also hard to accept is that outcomes are shaped by forces beyond our grasp.

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Past Selves Convene Into The Present

I'm not sure if chasing experiences can be considered as chasing a moving target. The former has a certain fixed aspect to it, as in replicating the same experience over and over again, but each new replicated experience also has a qualitative change to it.

Say you attempt to recapture the euphoria of your first concert by the same band. Same venue, same songs, but now you know every lyric, so the element of surprise is diminished and you're comparing rather than experiencing.

The target appears the same but has fundamentally transformed through your own evolution, hence the moving aspect is also a reflection of your changing self.

I think the act of trying to recreate an experience somehow destroys the conditions that made it meaningful in the first place.

If we try to step into the same river twice, we will realize we are no longer the same person who first felt its waters, and the river has probably changed too.

Still, there's a nostalgic pull toward keeping what was just as it was then, without realizing that this very desire transforms both the memory and our relationship to it.

In that sense, chasing experiences is merely a cover for chasing our past selves, those versions of us who were capable of that particular innocence, wonder, or openness.

Any attempt to recreate becomes a form of time travel that's doomed to fail because we bring our evolved consciousness back to moments that required our former innocence which we can't get back again.

This realization hits harder the more one grows older and still can't differentiate between what we actually lost and what we think we lost.

That's me, every now and then, too. Caught up with the same old tricks of the mind, believing that I can unknow what I now know.


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