20150821.0555

I worry that I am growing ossified, that I am losing my mental flexibility. (I do not worry about the physical. Why worry about what is gone?) I do not want to be a person who seeks the new because it is new, but I do not want to be a person who rejects the new because it is new, either. (I want to reject it for better reasons.) I know that there is good stuff coming out, but I find it hard to find it, and I have to force myself to remain open to things that might be good but are not the same as what I have had before. It exhausts me, and I do not appreciate the implications of that exhaustion, namely that I am obsolete. (I know that I have written of imminent obsolescence, but that is not the same thing that I mean here.)

In some senses, I am used to living in the past. As a scholar of the medieval, I necessarily engage with what has gone before at length and systematically. But that is not the kind of thing about which I worry; I engage with the past to make new knowledge about the present, even if I know that that knowledge will be superseded at some point (and likely not far into the future). I mean something more like being caught up in nostalgia, in prizing the days of my youth as an ideal time and not venturing beyond the "safe" confines of the popular culture of the later 1980s through 2000, maybe 2005. (I am the age I am, and I remember the later 1980s onward. I only earned my baccalaureate in 2005, at the "traditional" age.) Even within that, my scope is all too limited; I try to recapture something that I really never had.

I rail against nostalgia in large part because I feel myself swallowed by it more often than is good for me. I get lost in recollections of the past, usually of past shames and disgraces, all too many of which are utterly petty, and nearly all of which are recalled by few if not by me alone. It distracts me from what I am doing now, and it does not even do so with the benefit of being a "remember the good times" experience; it is chewing over bones long cracked to splinters, piercing my lips and gums and tongue, and I am masochist enough that I relish the pain and take the jagged mass more deeply into myself. It tastes bad, to be sure, but it is a familiar badness, one to which I am accustomed.

Eating something else every so often would be good. I have been making some efforts that way, although fewer than I likely ought to do and only after arguing myself into doing so. And it is simple things that most people accept as good and fun and decent, things like going to the park of an evening or attending a free event in walking distance from Sherwood Cottage; I have to encourage myself to go to them against the rhythm of "It's gonna suck because it always sucks, or near enough as doesn't matter" playing over and over again in my mind. That, or "You should be working," which is more or less always true--and it is true now.