Or I could get on with something useful instead

[hirez]

I've been in an unfortunate sort of place (maaan...) of late, as evidenced by the ratio of swearing to post-size.

Anyway.

While looking for one thing, that I knew was somewhere in the electronic pile of text and stuff I'm pleased to call an archive, I found a couple of others. This lead, as these quests are wont to do, onto a half-day delve through old emails and LJ posts. This was not the sort of thing that could be done by a chap in the grip of post-migraine stuffed brain chemistry and expect to have it end well.

Thinking about it, if I have any sort of order in my filings of, well, anything, it's essentially after the school of JL Borges.

So I was confronted by a past where I'd regularly been a bit of a pillock. I've been carrying that around and tending to it relatively carefully, and I begin to wonder why. See, before they invented LJ and when HD storage was expensive enough that no-one actually kept anything much, I didn't bother with this diary malarkey.

I lived in this blokey and oddly zen state of permanent now, with only a dim and alcohol-mediated version of the previous weekend. The past was something other people brought up because they were festering for an argument, while for me it was some kind of unravelling staircarpet and as long as I kept moving forward, the unravelling wouldn't catch me up and pitch me into space.

Or something like that.

While I suspect it's useful to keep reminders of the past about so one has some idea of what one was thinking, it also feels like I'm carelessly anchoring myself with the weight of this stuff.

Comments

[aeia.livejournal.com]

The best advice I've been given is live for the present. There's no point letting the past get to you and there's no point worrying about whats going to happen in the future. If anyone actually manages to live by these rule though please let me know!

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

'I lived in this blokey and oddly zen state of permanent now, with only a dim and alcohol-mediated version of the previous weekend. The past was something other people brought up because they were festering for an argument, while for me it was some kind of unravelling staircarpet and as long as I kept moving forward, the unravelling wouldn't catch me up and pitch me into space.'

John...that is the BEST opening for a story as I've ever seen! If the past is good for anything, it's to draw from. It's your well, dear. Without it, you would have no personality, no store of bits and pieces to grab at when you're creating your present. It shouldn't shackle you, but neither can you pitch it.

There are two sorts of people: People who are victims of their pasts, and people who are survivors. Victims wallow or repress. Survivors learn and move on. Whatever your past, whether tragic or pleasant, it applies.
XX

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

*applause*

Plus, if you don't know where you started from how can you judge where you've got to?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I have regular days of not being convinced that it matters. And indeed wondering how you measure it and against what.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

Nothing matters except being the person you want to be. And as you are in some ways the sum of your experiences, you can't lop off chunks of the past without lopping off chunks of who you are, for better or worse. What's important is to stop raking over the shit, or wishing after the nice stuff, but taking what it gives you and getting on with living now.

Re: measurement. "how far you've come" isn't about comparisons, or judgement, it's about knowing where you are and how you got there. I don't mean how far you've come in a shallow sense of profession, money, property, that sort of rubbish. I mean how far you've come in the sense of there being this road of life, maaaan, but the journey is all we have becsaue wwhen we reach the destination there's nothing left.

I was actually in a very similar conversation just the other week on LJ - this is obviously existentialism month.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

Indeed. :)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

You're right, naturally. (And thank you!)

However, I'm going to play with this a bit.

So several years ago, I had a bit of a funny turn, could no longer cope with what I was doing (which then was who I was) and so had to be taken back to the parental domicile for what turned out to be a six month lie down.

For the first three of those months, I didn't touch a computer. Given that I'd up to then been a hardcore spod that lived for compilers and breathed solder fumes, that was somewhat of a departure.

The walls of that room were lined with ten year piles of Byte, Practical Electronics, PCW, the NME... Anyone could walk in there and get a very good idea of what made me tick from a quick scan of those piles.

One day I took the lot outside, piled them up and set fire to them. It was an incredibly liberating experience, because I felt with that action I had cut myself free from my past and could now just be JHR for a bit.

[And: There's a TNG episode that encapsulates a lot of that thinking. The bridge crew have their memories zapped, so have to work out who they are and what they do from first principles. I watched that and had a moment of utter clarity.]

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

Burning those things was not obliterating your past. It was, as you feel, freeing yourself from it. I'm all for casting off anchors (or burning them, as the case may be) as a way of accepting and moving on. You, my darling, are a survivor. Your actions prove it. Had you held on to those things, or hidden them away, I would worry for your continued sanity.

That six month lie in might not have been pleasant, or the time leading up to it, but it shaped you, it shaped your present. Your reactions to that time, your memory of it, still effects the choices you make now in some small or grand way. You are who you are (in my opinion, a pretty awesome person) so you cannot regret anything that made you YOU.

My philosophy is that if you can bring anything positive from even the most horrific event, you are ahead of the game. Even painful lessons have worth if we manage to learn from them. If we don't, they're just pain.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

I still keep about 14 paper journals that cover 1999-2002, overlapping slightly with LJ (late 2001-present). I find it useful to read back and contrast with the present; on bad days it reassures me of how much I have improved mentally over the years.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

LJ Borges.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing, the way I see it, and I warn you, this may ramble.

The past is uneradicable. The reason for this is that it doesn't really exist, except in as much as it is part of the present and of the future. We can't make it not be part of us, because we are the sum of everything that has made us, and then a bit more. But we're not passive in that making; we can, to some extent at least, decide what to be influenced by and how (only to some extent, thought).

I think, though, that we often get mixed up between the past, and the reminders of the past. An old LJ entry is not the past; it is a record of the past, but the map and the territory are not the same thing (ah, there we go, that's what I was getting at, only I didn't realise it until just now). It is sometimes useful to keep maps of places you're never going back to; if you liked being there, they can bring back fond memories, and if you didn't like it, they can remind you which road _not_ to take.

On the other hand, sometimes they're just an encumbrance, and it's as well to take them outside and burn them, or move house and leave them behind, or just shut them in a box and put them in the back of a cupboard you don't open (I'm a hoarder; I find it difficult to destroy or throw things away in case I need them one day, although I very rarely _do_ need them) and leave them alone until you forget about them.

That's not disconnecting from your past, it's just not allowing it to have too great a part in defining who you are now (because inevitably we only revisit the most salient bits of our past, even though the intervening, and less painful, bits may be just as much a part of us-now), and not revisiting things which don't need revisiting.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

"An old LJ entry is not the past; it is a record of the past, but the map and the territory are not the same thing."

Perfection. Huzzah to you, dear.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Terri, this is Hester. She's a jolly good chap.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

Hester? Well, hello!

[miss-glitch.livejournal.com]

Due to an unfortunate absent-minded mistake deleted all my old email. I felt quite stunned for a while and then realised that actually I didn't really want to try to get it all back - there's no point hanging onto things and spending your time thinking about what's happened before when you could be out experiencing new things.

Before that I had thrown away my old notebooks because I'd changed as a person, and being paranoid I was making preparations in case I died and people went through them and got the wrong impression. Probably a bad reason for doing it but it did make me feel a lot less encumbered.

[diffrentcolours]

I've been routinely archiving away my NO2ID e-mail for the last 2 years, and am now going through and finding out what's still relevant and what I can throw away - I want to keep enough information to be able to ascertain a history, but remove enough of the noise that I don't get swamped.

[eljaydaly.livejournal.com]

I have a bunch of old journals dating back to when I was... oh... 20. For some reason, I'm afraid to throw them out -- almost like I'll dissolve in the wind if I do. But I don't really want them hanging around, reminding me of what an asshole I was.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend ritual burnings. I used to journal in notebooks (gasp--what? no computer? no lj?) and burn them every year on the first day of autumn.

An asshole, huh? Should I believe you?

[easterbunny.livejournal.com]

Don't tell me that you're on the cusp of taking up scrapbooking. I'll lend you my Bedazzler™ (if I ever manage to acquire one... thus is my grail).

The past used to be another country. Now it's spangled!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

What's one of them? I'm sure $work were big on scrapbooking. Anything to sell printing consumables, I guess.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

http://www.mybedazzler.com/

Beware - the website automatically launches an infomercial.

[bmlg.livejournal.com]

I'm not in much of a position to advise wisely, but maybe one could use the criteria we got at VP? Does this particular bit of your past serve to
a)develop character?
b)advance plot?
c)create setting?
If not, maybe it's just wallowing. If yes (though I'm a bit dubious about c) maybe it should be cut.
-Barbara

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Good points.

Hm.

'Unreliable narrator'.

(VP: Not just a workshop, but a way of tackling your life.)

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

It certainly does translate well!

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

I think that if one doesn't have a slightly foot-shuffling oh-look-is-that-the-time attitude towards pillockries past, then one is either a mind-numbingly boring individual or hasn't yet to realise that one has been acting like a pillock.

Past. Another country. Postcards. etc etc.

Perhaps you should sex up the levels of violence and psychotropic chemistry, just in case of a future "This is your life" incident.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Quite. I think that's about the size of it.

As it happened, I was recalling stories of past misbehaviour with Ed 'chainsaw' Price last weekend. His young lady was looking from one to the other of us as this went on, seemingly convinced we were some kind of terrible beast-men in vaguely human form.

So I think the working hypothesis here is that things involving rubbish cars, country pubs, chainsaws, your mate's band and strong psychedelics are all good fun.

Stuff that involves g*ths, tiresome personal politics and, um, g*ths, isn't.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

rubbish cars, country pubs, chainsaws, your mate's band and strong psychedelics are all good fun

Yes, but when combined, the amount of fun derived increases exponentially. It's not a real party without at least one chainsaw, anyway.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

I want mr_tom to come to my next party. /g/

[hazeii.livejournal.com]

'We enter the future backwards'
- Paul Valery

Save it. Use it. Bless it.

[jendama.livejournal.com]

I think saving stuff like that is appropriate, especially if you can read it and feel good that you have evolved* since writing or experiencing it. If you discover that you have not evolved then it is a good self-kick-in-the-trousers (oh, how I want to say pants but then that cliché does not work well in the UK) to get up and do something about it.

I also think that some of the stuff is good to use for personal writing projects. You can become inspired by something wonderful, frightening, horrible, etc. (i.e. the inspiration to write does not always have to come from a happy, glowing source).



*mentally, spiritually, socially, physically, etc.