Space and Time

"Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that will be different."

--Robert Louis Stevenson

I went to the orthodontist on Friday. I don't want to talk about it. Let's just say this is going to take forever.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I've been turning my eye to the past this week, and to times when I've felt myself to be brighter, deeper, more in focus. I'm taking out these moments, and turning them over in my mind as thought they were glittery jewels. I'm delighted by them. I'm also tortured by them.

I went to a party on Friday night at The Gowanus Ballroom In the cavernous industrial space, Morgan O'Kane played extraordinary banjo mountain music as aerialists performed feats of elegant strength 20 feet above. We walked among the huge art installations and lazed within in an enormous iron replica of Genie's bottle. The floor shook with fantastic, frenzied dancing, and I was transported back to 1995 when art and bluegrass and frenzied dancing were weekly occurrences. It felt odd but so satisfying to reinhabit that time and place.

I read this today at from Adventurer's Club:

While it's often fashionable to dwell upon what might have been, what's usually overlooked is that really and truly, it couldn't have.

Because, invariably, any romanticized versions of how things "might have been," are based upon fictionalized versions of the past.

This is such a useful quote. Those moments, no matter how pretty and significant, were merely stepping stones to this one, as this one will merely be a stepping stone to 2012 and beyond. Whatever has happened stays static in the past, though alive and beautiful in memory. As one of my professors said in class in 1995, quoting EM Forester, "In space things meet, in time things part."

What is meeting in the space I am in right now? My teeth are beginning to meet each other in the right places. I've been meeting my yoga practice everyday, faithfully, for two weeks now. And I'm soon to meet a new year and everything that it may hold.

Very curious about the glittery jewels to be found there...