There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live…the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.
It is a space anime with characters living quick and dangerous, but due to the way it is written, hand-animated, detailed, and grounded to a heavy extent, this one anime hits different as I age. It is itself targeting an older audience compared other blockbuster animes, but nevertheless it is one that keeps some aspects with you through the rewatches, but can also have substantial new feelings as you gain different life experiences. All of the main characters themselves have some kind of a past that is weighing them down through their current affairs, but their power to go on can be mostly summarized to living a life in limbo all the while trying to cope with it via simple tough-guy acts of trying to be indifferent to it.
It is not a good mantra that can be maintained for long. It is rather something that helps delaying the immediate feelings before the acceptance comes.
Not really a mantra, but I try to remind myself that the only thing that seems to be certain in life is change. If you’re in a shitty spot, just wait for the change. Will it be a change for the good or a change for the bad? You can’t always predict it, but it WILL change. Often, that means when I’m in a shitty mood or scenario, I wait for the change to happen in a more positive direction.
In the future this will be a period of time I’ll remember clearly, which makes it valuable. Easy times lead to no substantial memories which is effectively the loss of that time.
Dad’s out of town so I’m staying at his house taking care of his dog. I love this dog. But also take this dog for granted a lot, especially when I’ve just come home from work and I’m irritable and overwhelmed.
I pretend that, instead of this being me here and now, it’s a future version of me, from maybe thirty years in the future, when this dog has been long dead. Then I imagine that this moment is some kind of miracle wormhole through time where the me from the time this dog is an ancient memory has been given a few minutes to be with the dog.
Like, I would happily trade my finger and all the money I have for a minute with my mother, who died fifteen years ago. But I can’t.
What I can do is treat the people around me as I would treat my mother in that one minute, if it were somehow granted to me.
Almost like opening myself up to visitation from my future self. And in doing so, I experience more richly and it will actually work. When the dog is long gone, in the ground for decades, I will be able to visit him because I opened myself, which led to deep memory inscription.
Brilliant post, and I try to do the same thing, if I’m somewhere beautiful or profound and I have a few minutes to myself I like to make a “memory bubble” to me it’s like a little snapshot of experience that I work really hard to recall every minute detail ( including my emotional state and sounds and smells, etc…) and then I can revisit them in the future.
I like this because it makes you appreciate where you are at the time more, and gives you good memories to lean on in the future.
Incidentally, I think this phenomenon of appreciating the present by looking through the lens of a future where it’s lost, is the basis of the band name The Grateful Dead.
I’m open to discussion, but now that I’ve existed for a substantial period of time, I’ve found that my most prevailing memories are the ones hard won (e.g. when I almost had to sleep on the streets or ran out of money in a foreign country or got evicted from my flat). Whereas days sat on my couch watching telly, or in the pub having fun with friends, or another routine day in the gym are all blurred memories with no definition and no real sense of elapsed time.
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