I sometimes look for people in places where I’m not likely to find them. And if that sounds silly, maybe I should explain.
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I split up with my partner a few months ago. During the time we were together
we went to hundreds if not thousands of places. Sometimes when I pass one of
those places, I stop to look if she’s there. I know it’s not likely, but
because I’ve seen her there before, I still look. It’s the right place, but at
the wrong time.
For example, I regularly go past Leeds Art Gallery. We once
met there for lunch in the Tiled Hall Café during my lunch break from work. I
remember she sat in Dante’s corner, as she called it, and she was pleased to see
me. Well, now every time I go past, I call in and look for her in the same
corner. She’s never there, but even though it’s very faint, I can still feel an
echo of that past meeting.
At the end of our relationship, in our last few interactions, she was hurt and upset with me. My memories of those last few meetings are painful to recall. But experiencing a brief echo of a past meeting where things were more positive helps to dilute that.
We experience our lives from a linear viewpoint, measured in
days and years, and sometimes the ways things end is painful. But once events
are in the past, I wonder, does it make any difference what order
things happened in?
When events are recent and / or distressing, the memories of those events are like
Pringles in a tube where you have to take the top one first, but as you move on,
they become more like socks in a drawer, you can pull out whichever pair you
want.
My relationship ended with stress and annoyance it also had countless moments that were full of joy and happiness. My hope is that as time moves on, it gets easier to view all those
moments as equal, not just giving more weight to the latest, more painful ones. Even when a situation ends badly, that shouldn't diminish the happy moments that also once existed.
Einstein said that ‘the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion". One of my favourite passages from any book is from Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. It's one of my favourites because I hope it's true.
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that
when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the
past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past,
present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians
can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of
the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments
are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion
we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string,
and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever"
