Refining Experiences
The title shouldn’t be taken too literally, as that would make it sound more deliberate than it really is. I might muster up the clarity to tie it back later, but for now it serves more as a pointer than a claim.
The type of experiences I'm specifically referring here are frustrating and depressing ones, the old is about to go, that much is certain, the new hasn't arrived yet, and there's this anxious wondrous imaginative state of mind that's trying to create what to expect when the new comes based on preconceived ideas of the old which really is certain will no longer be.
I think the camp of "nothing is new under the sun" has firmly stamped its mark on our collective psyche, so much so that any new thing has first to be digested via the old frameworks before getting integrated, if one reaches that far of course. Sometimes it's totally discarded similar to an organ rejecting a transplant.
One case that I can recall is how experts discuss climate change almost exclusively through apocalypse narratives which arguably was inherited from Cold War anxieties. As of late, not much discussion is happening on this domain that I'm aware of.
Keep control
Fortunately, it's not necessarily a personal choice to accept or reject transformation.
In my view, the most invisible sides of change happen in the background, sometimes with relatively small subconscious decisions compounded over time and that has less of an individual impulse and more of being guided of sorts by higher aspects of oneself.
I think this is the main reason why my practical self has a hard time accepting that letting go means actually letting go, not the type of letting go via which the driver just moves to the passenger seat but then continues to direct whatever is driving that this is where I should go!
This is the same practical self that would turn crazy on not knowing where to go exactly, basically an executioner without a North star. It just wants to do something, anything to keep the facade that it is in control.
Not that I dwell too much on it, observing the different characters that we have come to light and recede based on the external circumstances one is experiencing puts another perspective on this fickle aspect of identity. It's a roller-coaster for sure to be aware of the changes and watch the part of me that's watching, which itself seems to shift positions, zoomed in or zoomed out, and not being able to settle on a fixed vantage point.
Spiral up
The refining aspect of these experiences, I guess, is evolutionary, in that having more capacity to deal with the frustrations/depression when it comes again with a different flavour until it just loses its grip.
I haven't given much thought to whether this refinement works through and through in the same way as repeating the same mistakes in different formats until one learns the lesson that the mistake is trying to teach. It is a prevalent theme in discussions of evolution. But maybe that's giving too much credit to linear progress.
Not all progress is linear or exponential. There's a noticeable spiralling quality to it, returning to similar territories from an altered perspective.
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