Seagull on camera.I wake up thinking about some of the mistakes I have made and of the many occasions when my judgement has been out of balance. Then I recognise that I am assuming, from my present viewpoint, that I have now reached a state of maturity and wisdom which allows me to proscribe my past transgressions with such confidence. There is an implication that henceforth such errors will occur no more in my life. Alas, I don't think that I will ever grow up, or grow wise. If in five years time I am still around, I wonder, if I look back, how I will view the present time and my daily blathering from the still moving vehicle in which, if I am lucky, I will still be travelling.
They are going to decorate the outside of the house next door. All day there is the clunk and bump of scaffolding being erected and the calls of scaffolders one to another. I try not to listen to this restless music, but I do hear one of the merry scaffolder reprimand another as he mishandles a pole with: "You doughnut!" which I find restrained and memorable. How many people in these troubled times use such gentle forms of abuse?
4 comments:
I think errors of the sort you're referring to don't really become errors until you've done them more than once. A once-only error could probably be classified as an accident, something that could have gone either way. Nothing personal. True errors are hard-wired failings, strings of tin cans tied to our ankle, that we've dragged around for years. Failings in fact. Not only ineradicable but capable of stealing up on us and dealing ghastly memories out of a past we like to think of as sealed. Far from helping us blunt these Proustian experiences, maturity seems to paint them in brighter colours, turning remembrance into something even more painful. Time turns out to be no healer.
As hard as it may be to accept, I seriously doubt that your life's errors, blunders, accidents are any worse, or probably as bad as the next fellow's.
And how many of them even share your level of introspection? ;~/
Not out of your wild and reckless youth yet then, Joe? I always rather liked that Bob Dylan line 'Oh but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.'
One of the worrying things about it to me is that the things which seemed important and dire at the time often dwindle, and most of my embarrassment is concerned with how much fuss I made about my own mortification when it would have been better to shut up and let it go, while things which I tried to brush off as insignificant at the the time are the ones that make me cringe and hide my head in shame under the bedclothes in the silent watches of the night.
You shouldn't really have got me started on this, it really should be my specialist subject...
Or maybe the subject for our (individual) Specialists! ;)
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