passing moment

words from robert fripp: “The end: always bitter-sweetness. This moment has gone: it will never be here again. In these moments, we are practising our dying.”

imagine if you will, well, maybe you won’t even need to imagine this - perhaps you'll be able to recall a single mind-blowing or world-shattering memory or a whole series of memories in which case... lucky you!
so -
a moment filled, surrounded, and infused with intensity that elevates itself in your experiencing beyond anything similar passes by like a sudden gust. here, and just as quickly gone and then you vainly struggle to recognize what it was that just happened. what was that? why now? why wasn’t i more inside that moment?

and then comes the more or less inevitable, the grasping for a reexperiencing of the moment because, especially if it was good or lovely or magical in any way, you (like me) want to know that moment over and over again, like putting a cd on the player and pushing the loop button so that you can reexperience the joy and beauty of it over and over until you’re sick of it. or not!

but of course, you know it doesn’t come back, not quickly, not cleanly, not gloriously as before. so then you carry on with life knowing that you had an experience that stepped out of the ordinary, an experience that cannot be duplicated, an experience that - like all experiences - has gone and will never come back again in the same form. in this way we refine wistfulness. in this way we refine romance.

and then the mourning of its passing or the acceptance of its being one of the many pearls on the string of your life, begins.

this picture is of some flowers that were in my home for a period of six weeks. they have very obviously passed their prime and yet as i collected them and placed them in juxtaposition, something very lovely emerged that had no referents to their previous life as flowers. so here they are in a new moment, very much dead and yet alive in ways they couldn’t otherwise be.

and perhaps that is how it is with experiences. they die naturally. they pass. they become a piece that in the context of time has been left behind. and yet with each revisiting they become alive again in a way that is distinct from their first becoming being. their beauty is perhaps less direct, coloured by our experience of the passing of time, and yet also complemented by subtleties that were previously overlooked in the raw beauty of the moment.