20240807

structures are built on factors

your structure's tolerances involve all of those factors and the probability of those factors changing

a friendship is based on a mutual friend being a mutual friend? what if you learn something about the person in common that you can't tolerate? is that okay?

how does this apply to the choices we make as we create structure? how can we learn from this?

---

This poem was read aloud at Oxford University, last night, by its author. It is not mine. I do not know the author's name.

Memory is a murky thing: The moments of our lives caught in fleeting glimpses.

Recollection is an imperfect chemical reaction: Neurons firing to recreate pathways to the past.

But this backtracking opens these avenues to vulnerabilities with each remembrance; simultaneously cementing and morphing the story rendered in that electrical series.

How does one capture experience when preservation entails dilution of perception or the entropy of exposure to the present?

Does one ever know again that which was already lived?

To accept the weathering of salience feels like abandonment rather than desperately grasp for each flash of bygones.

This sentimental hoarding of all that once was, is not enough.

To trust the temporal through-line of self to believe that the you that you are now will always be with you, each version of you that always was: beautiful hauntings in the memories of your mind.

This moment is not gone.

It lives with you.

It stays with you.

Trust that this you will guide you gently along the way and every version of you that you are to become.