I was on the tram and sitting beside me was a lady holding a white rose, just a stalk. For a minute, I thought it was artificial but then I looked closely and realized it was the real deal.
It got me thinking of how fake things really imitate realness so much that it even seems like an improved version. An artificial rose for example is free of thorns, does not wither, does not need roots, can exist much longer than a real rose but the beauty of the rose is fragility. The fact that the petals can fall, that the thorns sting, that it needs the right environment to bloom-the right soil, sun to water ratio.
I think as people we do this, we try to refine ourselves beyond our vulnerabilities because we think it makes us more formidable, we seek the protection that a life devoid of pain offers, the hedonistic pursuit of bliss and happiness; but what is life without death, with no possibility to fade or re-emerge? Am I being macabre or do you catch my drift?
If you are honest, I am sure you can travel back to the time when you changed something about yourself because you thought that was the way to become less vulnerable. It happens to all of us especially after we get disappointed. While it is human to self preserve. I think more often than not we edit ourselves out of certain experiences from fear.
This question was posed in a book I was reading, “what will you choose experience or memory?” The idea being whether experiences are more valuable than memories or whether experience are only valuable with memories? At the end of that chapter the author, Rolf Dobelli puts it this way, “A life of wondrous yet forgotten memories is still a wondrous life….”
A dear friend said to me in a conversation “Happiness should not be felt in perpetuity” and at first I resisted the idea of that thought because if I had a choice, I´d choose to always be happy, ecstasy will be my watchword and life policy but the idea behind this comment was the very fact that it is impossible to be consistently happy in this version of life so, it is expedient to accept happiness in the same sense that we must embrace sadness.
Another post I came across in recent weeks put it this way “refuse to idolize happiness.” An African proverb that read: “for the beauty of the rose, we water the thorn.”
What do all these analogies point to? the various ways we edit ourselves out of originality, out of experiences, out of the wonder of existence, out of living. If only we learn to accept the imperfections and the thorns as we do the petals. If only we find the zeal to embrace our fragility.
I understand that we need to protect our hearts and try to adapt to pain in ways that shield us from repeating similar experiences, but as scripted in a movie clip, I saw, “Your heart is going to shrivel anyway, why not use it?” If we have just this life, we may as well live to our best possibilities, soaking up all the experiences as we go.
So we may not always be happy, we may have moments so low that we feel as though we’d never see light again because of how far in darkness we seem to be buried. While, we may experience pain so broken that we become disenfranchised, while we may fall so low that we are consumed by all the ways we have become a cliché, while we may grief, hurt, fade away, it doesn’t change the beauty in all of us.
The collection of all your sad days is not all you are, so even when happiness fades, there is joy in knowing that you got to live it all. So make it count!
Hasta la vista, Hasta luego!
xoxo
dcconoisseur.
Connoisseur of Memories 