“It’s not what you thought when you first began it…”
I was recently reflecting on the notion of time operating like a spiral. Where we can move through phases with echoing familiarity from a new and – hopefully – more fully informed perspective. Just at present it feels less like a spiral and more like Escher’s stairs; my vantage shifts elevation based on the degree to which I have integrated whatever lesson previous experience may have afforded me.
Lately, it has felt like I am in the basement trying to determine how long it’s going to take me to get up to ground level again, let alone gaining additional ground. Revisiting music I wrote 20 years ago catapults me into an eerily similar set of feelings about a completely separate set of circumstances. Heartache from wounds long healed echoes through my body and soul amplifying present pain. Having written a poignant soundtrack to my despair, it feels almost as though I am condemned to proceed through the same sequence of bewildering romantic calamities.
It would appear I have not, in fact followed Ms. Mann’s advice to “Wise Up” Part of my failure comes from a creeping complacency developed over a decade bereft of the primary substance of my emotional life. I felt nothing as intensely; neither pleasure nor pain. It was easier to deploy intellectual understanding to make “good” and “correct” choices. My heart was moved but little, and did not clamor with longing and illogic.
And now it does. As it did before.
I remember what has come before, and thus I know things, but I cannot seem to apply any of them to the moment I am in. A moment full of yearning, regret, and a typically futile desire to turn back time and make a different choice.
“I’m holding my breath. And I’m turning blue. Forget what I said; let’s decide it’s not true.”
I know that wisdom and deep feeling are not mutually exclusive. Many of the greatest sages are passionate in their expression of enlightenment, but that feels beyond the reach of this moment for me. I am still too raw with renewed feeling toward everything and occupied with a panoply of griefs. My pedantry tokens have an abysmal exchange rate for the lucre of emotional-bandwidth, so I am unable to meet the task with sufficient resources in hand.
As ever, patience – in perpetually short supply – is the likely remedy. As much as the play-through of this catalog is intermittently agonizing, I am also sure beyond doubt there are other songs in my future. Songs that confirm the magic of the precisely correct moment. Ones that contain harmony I’ve never heard before. Songs that will Save Me.
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