Not so great moments

What if you could eavesdrop on any conversation in the world? Would you choose napoleon’s military plots, Cleopatra’s love affairs, or the Beatles brainstorming session?

I remember when I was much younger a cousin of mine pitched this theory of sound waves being stuck in the atmosphere and how we can actually retrieve all of them one day and decipher the greatest conversations ever made. At the time I fantasized about figuring out historical speeches and uncovering big secrets. Now if I had the opportunity to go back to a conversation I would definitely revisit the ones I have had over coffee cups or cocktails with the awesome everyday people I have come across in my humble short existence. You see I believe in the power of the mundane over the extraordinary. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” as John Lennon puts it.

I don’t know about you, but personally, it has recently come to my attention that in search of a greater future and a better moment I am missing out on the greatest time of all: the present. We spend endless time trying to figure out where we are going next and who will be there with us, thereafter, we end up apprehending while we should have been appreciating. I realize now that my most interesting conversations took place while I was planning a future that I ended up not pursuing. However it was that thinking process, that apprehension that fueled my days and forged my human interactions regardless of the end result.

However, once the apprehension is gone and the facts have been laid down, something even less productive takes place: we assign values to past moments. This is how when I want to remember today why I decided to specialize in psychiatry after general medicine, I go back to a specific moment in my first year of medicine, the one I attribute this decision to. However, if I were to dig deeper into my memory, I would recall being lost for a long time, not knowing where my next step would take me and hesitating multiple times before and after that specific moment. However, it is part of civilization’s romanticism to create these artificial moments and believe in them. I have been trying to break free from these clichés recently in an attempt to retrieve my “old self” (that concept by itself can easily warrant another full post discrediting it) and in that spirit I realized now I will not be going into psychiatry. So where does that leave me at? Nowhere really. I am still in the present where I left off before I started typing. Yet what is intriguing is how the past suddenly started losing its associated value and a couple of months from now that first year of medicine moment will lose its value for life and be forgotten.  

Take an easier example, how often does a song get stuck in your head? It probably happens on a weekly basis, then the song just fades away and gives its room in your head to another one. Here’s the thing, if a significant good or bad anecdote happens to take place while the song is stuck, you will for years down the road attribute the strong emotions generated by the events to the song. Yet the song by itself is devoid of meaning. This is how a particular Najwa Karam song takes me back to my old grandma’s winter house and reminds me of her although she probably never knew who that singer was.   

I am not arguing that one should not reflect on his past and analyze it. I am simply pointing out how often the great moments we look for in our daily lives are made up and how easy it is to just go on and create fresh new moments destined to become great one day.

In the end, the past and the future are two faces to the same coin which we toss around incessantly. What we fail to realize is how that coin itself is actually our present. In that light, we cannot start living until we have grabbed that coin and secured it tightly in our pockets. We cannot secure the coin until we stop those fingers from tossing it around in search for luck and victory because tossing only adds to the anxiety and never quenches it. In a nutshell, this is a post about living everyday independently of the one before and after it, this is a post about freeing the present from expectations and previous judgments.