From a distance …
The impact of many experiences we have, the people we meet and places we visit are often best appreciated from a distance.
A distance of space and/or time that allows for the right perspective, hidden meanings and appropriate reflection that reveal and deepen.
Truths and forecasts shared that initially may feel like delusions and hallucinations but time proves them true and we wish we had acted and listened when we first heard them.
Situations or people we take for granted but realize their importance when they are no longer there.
Carly Simon in “Anticipation” sings that she “will stay right here because these are the good old days”.
The joy of finding lost things.
The Poet Kate Ryan writes of the “joy of finding lost things”
All of us have lost things and sometimes re-found them.
Often not.
A set of keys, a wallet, a passport.
Sometimes a child in a crowd and sometimes a friend after an argument who we make up with.
Other times it is our health or a home or a job.
When we lose something, we often feel more pain in its absence than the joy we had in its presence.
Whenever we have the opportunity to recover it, we appreciate it more than ever before.
An exercise from the Stoics is to imagine you have lost something to appreciate what one has.
As the line goes “we do not know what we have until we have lost it”
The regrets of omission versus the errors of commission.
Study after study of people at the end of their lives find that what gave them the greatest joy were relationships and what they most regretted were not things they had done but what they had not done.
The errors of omission versus the errors of commission.
Time and distance make people regret the people they did not reach out to share their feelings with, the path less traveled they did not take and that “person” they saw but never talked to.
Here is a single minute from Citizen Kane about “that girl in white” about an opportunity not taken which is one of the most powerful scenes from a movie with many of them:
Often a moment of time is pregnant with possibility and then it passes. Over time one begins to realize that door wide open has now shut close.
The time and opportunity may not come again.
Time and “the ordinary day”.
In the future the ritual of the ordinary day will be special.
Life does not have to be lived forward and understood backward if we decide to pay attention.
Be aware of the fading moments of now.
Look around you. Watch the special quality of light or listen to the hiss of the air duct.
Treasure the conversations and even the repetition and lack of differentiation of day after day.
Because one day it will not be so…
“Carpe Diem” as expressed by Joan Didion.
The late and famed essayist Joan Didion once wrote about the distance we travel from our own selves and how as time moves forward and people, places and hopes come and go people are shaped by what is no more.
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day is not at all”
But in the end Didion notes we go on by forging new stories and finding new places and begin forgetting.
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
But one must forge ahead…
“Do not whine...Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
And to college graduates a few years ago she made the case for living deeply…
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
All images created by Rishad Tobaccowala using MidJourney
One Single Thing.
Among the very best thinkers about AI and its implications is Ethan Mollick.
He writes a free Substack named “One Useful Thing” which is a must read. He is the author of a great book called Co-Intelligence and his new book Co-Existence is available for pre-order
His latest post “The Twilight of the Chatbots” will make you really think…