When i was younger, i used to really believe that there was a point I’d reach in life where the baseline emotion i felt was happiness, or at least some sort of contentedness. That a goal for me to aim for was this state where moments pass by largely pleasant and anxiety, discomfort, worry, and pain were fleeting.
It’s easy to look back in time and think of memories of old times this way, actually, after they’ve happened. It amazes me how quickly painful stretches of time spent agonizing over the future, bogging myself in work or worry, what felt like eons of misery, all very quickly are erased and coalesce into the briefer moment of happiness or enlightenment or intellectual interest that most immediately followed it. We as humans tend to thrive when we’re able to learn from our mistakes. it seems to me that this might inextricably link to a tendency to frame memories around the lesson rather than the pain which lead to it: the latter is not forgotten altogether, but simply positioned as rising action and climax to a moral attached perfunctorily at the end. So this expectation that one can live through the present in the same way we live through the past is one that is maybe naïve and romantic but ultimately and more importantly simply in vain; were that to be the case, we’d never learn in the first place.
I suppose what frustrates me more these days is not that we have to go through struggle in order to learn and grow but that it seems possible that my ability to learn and grow fluctuates over time and at least currently i don’t feel as capable of “solving” the problems in my life i currently face as i did when i was younger. Maybe the problems are harder. maybe im worse equipped. Who knows.
