On my day to day as a voided husk of human that i am, i often think about the things I’ve done (or not) that i could’ve done better, retracing my each of my steps that lead to the decision i took, why i took it and imagining a scenario for a different response for each and every one of those decisions, daydreaming about what has been, what could have been, and what it could be, this process is something that I’ve always done ever since i have memories of failing at something, i remember very clearly how i spent most of the morning in my school looking at the square lines in my notebook, absent of anything remotely associated with the current class thinking about what i could’ve done better the class before that which in turn would make me fail at whatever the class was about and so the cycle continued on forever.
My relationship with failure has been tumultuous through all of my life, i hate failing, i hate myself for failing, and most importantly i hate that i can’t seem to learn from failure.
When i was attending psychotherapy psychologists often told me that failure is what builds the steps needed to succeed, that failing means the confirmation of the wrong path and that one should recognize that as the path that shall not be retraced again, by process of elimination of bad choices one finds the correct path to realization. That of course sounds nice and all, it works for many people and makes sense logically but the more i think about the more i find holes in that way of thinking (as far as I’m concerned), in a sense, finding wrong paths always leads to failure, no one can reach the end of a road by merely stepping on the grass, nor can anyone climb up the stairs of accomplishment by always failing to put a foot on the next step, success is always built on top of success, one needs to succeed in distinguishing right from wrong first in order to do right, so what happens to someone that thinks they know the difference between the right path and the wrong path but actually doesn’t? What about self sabotaging? How does someone that is afraid of even taking the wrong path ever finds their way to the end? metaphorical end btw, i’m well aware that success cannot be measured. I often think about stuff like that while walking to work.
A random moment has been stuck in my head for the past week that i cannot seem to find the right answer for, no matter what i think about it i can never seem to reach the appropriate answer, let me tell you about it:
My grandfather died a year and 2 moths ago, an event that didn’t really shook my life, of course i was sad and all, but in reality i was more worried about my father and what his reaction to all of it could be, turns out we both think about death as a natural phenomenon and nothing more, he had accepted his father was going to die, so when he did the only thing we could do was remember him as the incredible person he was, we even joked about him taking his rolex watch with him to the grave. When it was time to cremate him they had to take him from the veiling ceremony to the crematory, my sister and my father took one of the family cars and me and my mother took the other, then a caravan of our family chased behind us, when we reached the crematory and everyone was gathering arround my sister came to me and said:
“He cried, very briefly, but he did”.
A year later after celebrating a mass in memory of my grandfather we would sit in a park in front of the church, while my parents where talking to one of my grandfathers friends i was looking at my phone reading some banal twitter stuff when someone i didn’t noticed previously approached me and said:
“Hey, do you like ____?”
I couldn’t actually hear what he was talking about but i noticed he had a lot of incense boxes so i immediately assumed he was trying to sell me some, so in trying to get him to leave me alone i said:
“Sorry, i don’t understand what you are talking about, I’m not really interested.”
He didn’t really emote, his eyes looked just about as neutral as one can make them, and he said:
“I used to have hair like yours when i was young, i used to love all those rock bands… it’s just that i saw your hair and got reminded of that and i thought that maybe you where a fan of them too”
Then he left.
I wouldn’t really think about it at the moment but later my head kept circling around that event, was i too rude? Should i have said something kinder to him? Did i let my prejudice get the better of me by assuming he was trying to sell me something? Maybe i did knew the band he was talking about and we could’ve had a nice chat about it, he saw something in me that made him nostalgic and i responded with coldness and apathy, that being said, being approached at random like that by a street vendor would put any latino at the defensive, street vendors are really intense over here. But what if i really didn’t know the band he was talking about? Could we have still had a chat about the genre? Would that made him happy? Would that made me happy in retrospect? I don’t really know. I want to defend myself and given the situation i think i was right in having my reservations, but at the same time i feel that i could’ve been kinder. One can always be kinder, either to Oneself or others.
Random Thought Of The Day
“Random thoughts are not random, they are the consequence of our memories”
Goodbye Namaiki Girl 