I guess the word I’m looking for is Youth, though it feels a bit off.
There’s this unwritten understanding but I’m not sure if it has a word. Oh, I guess you could call it “glory days” I suppose. Glory days indeed.
Would you say we’re in our glory days right now? Or are we in-between chapters? Hidden between creases.
Every elder you meet certainly carries their glory days. It pokes out in conversations if you hang around long enough. Do you think it’s sad? I wouldn’t call it sad, though there’s something certainly forboding about it.
The mere existence of “glory days” unleashes a few uncomfortable emotions that the youth will never understand.
Like how you fade away. Like how everything fades away, and you lose that collective delusion that whatever history is, well, you won’t be a part of it. You’ll just read its contents and exist in a snowglobe cosmopolitan city. But now you’re creaky, cranky, and one’s insolence isn’t left unpunished. The shops have different names and the walls got a new paint and it happens slowly, slowly, then all at once.
It catches up to you.
Glory is fleeting I suppose. Even if you changed the world, the world turns once more. Even the greatest minds are sometimes, at best, footnotes.
Whether one earnestly pads their “glory days” with accolades or lets them slink by subdued – in either case the burden follows you. The mere existence of those “glory days” assumes that whatever is your here and now is, at best, a paragraph.
How do you deal with that? That idea where you’ll never experience anything with such a lustre again? That every moment from now on is dimmer than the last, until Death comes.
I guess I deal with it in two ways. The first way is to not accept such premises. We’re no oracles. You never know what’ll happen next. Maybe you’ll learn to fly if you’re earnest enough.
The second way is to not attach so much significance to this life. We are merely observers, and whatever identity you’re sporting is just parts in the game. It unlikely to be your true nature.
What I mean is that you are what you were before you were born. No memories, no attachments, no peoples. Maybe one could be scared of losing whatever this identity you have now. Certainly.
Though I’d rather know you at the point – the day before I ever met you. Another observer. Maybe one and the same. Isn’t innocence just a proxy of that version of yourself? Unblemished, unassuming. A pool of potential.
Well, anyway, since glory is so fleeting, and regret shall flood you either way if you let it, so I learn to appreciate the moments however mundane. Because that’s all you ever really have.
It doesn’t matter if I never see you again, or never met you. All that matters is if we can see this present moment.
It doesn’t have to be labelled anything at all, nor recorded in any book, nor contending for any spot in your glory day mantle.
It just is. It’s here. You’re here reading this, I’m here writing it, and we have access to this for all of eternity. That’s all that matters.
That’s all we can do to shield against the glory day menace. Everything else returns to dust.
There just doesn’t seem to be any point to holding onto memories which taint that present moment, glorious or not. Why would you make a footnote out of the only constant you could ever have? Why continue to acquiesce to things which are no longer here, or possibly never existed in the first place?
It doesn’t matter if there was a beautiful sunset-by-the-sea dinner somewhere in the recesses of my mind, because it’s gone, and it may as well never happened. It doesn’t exist, and I could imagine an infinite set of more interesting events, or imagine another sunset-by-sea-dinner right now with a different cast of characters to replace it.
There is nothing more beautiful than whatever is in front of us, which we can choose each moment, through whichever eye we’re inclined.