I saw ENDGAME, the fourth AVENGERS movie today [Note: two weeks ago]. One of its main themes is reality — mine, yours, theirs, ours. What actions and events of the past have shaped the reality, the truth we perceive today. It got me thinking about my own reality in that regard. What did I do decades ago that helped shape what’s happening now? What DIDN’T I do decades ago that has helped create what’s NOT happening now?
For months now, since perhaps late last summer I’ve been in this hyper-reflective mode, looking back and examining my past, looking for justifiable actions and inexcusable inaction. Earlier this year I’d told a few people that I was perhaps experiencing a midlife crisis of some sort. After all I have officially entered middle-age. This is normal, right? The nostalgia? The reflection? The past glories. Hell, even the rose-colored glasses, right? It’s all natural for persons of a certain age.
I tend to be obsessed with the relativity and connection of things and people, so I’m no stranger to being accused of obsessing with the past, but you see the past is akin to sports statistics: it, like statistics, is a record of actual events. So like runes you study it to assess the present with some hope of forecasting the future.
Today is merely yesterday’s tomorrow.
Another major theme of AVENGERS: ENDGAME was time-travel — going back into certain epochs of time to steal something of that time to help fix or course-correct current and future time. A lot of us are fond of saying: if I could go back in time I would change some things. Not everything. But maybe a few things, here or there, to help affect this or that. I feel that way quite often anymore. My purpose of doing so is completely for additive reasons, though. But of course to add is also to subtract because the actions are different sides of the mathematical coin. So there are rules to this, right? Laws that are inarguable and unavoidable.
That said, it doesn’t stop one from wanting to do it anyway. Lately I’ve regretted things I didn’t do more than things I did do. But, again, there is that duality of two opposite things being the same token, just different sides of it — a matter of perspective, ultimately. Inaction is effectively an action of doing nothing, of standing pat, remaining inert, etc. My choice not do something is still having done something. It’s just that in most cases my choices were wrong. I should have done this or that, instead of that or this.
Lost Signal 