Life in the Fourth Dimension (I)
I never felt like I was growing older. Looking back on my “childhood” and such, I feel like I’ve always been the same person. I still do stupid things to other people, lose opportunities because I hesitate, and for the life of me, have nothing to say. None of that has ever changed.
I’ve never felt like I was more mature, more intelligent, more of much. That’s probably why I don’t care about birthdays. Okay, I’m one year older, and that’s supposed to mean something? Wisdom, knowledge, responsibility–these things aren’t gained as soon as you tack on another year. It’s not like leveling up in an RPG. They come with experiences, and experiences aren’t linear.
They weave through one another, across time and space. People fall in and fall out, situations resolve at one point and unravel at another, years later. We have to be careful about our actions, all of them, because if a particular situation is not a closed one, one person has the potential to affect millions of others. It’s not only in politics that we are chaos butterflies.
I would say that what seems to be different is the clarity with which I see things. (That’s a figurative, of course. My actual eyesight sucks.) Hindsight is more than twenty-twenty, but hindsight is essentially worthless if you can’t apply what you’ve seen to the future. My foresight has improved; it’s not perfect, but it hasn’t completely failed me yet, and I’ll bet it’s better than yours.
It doesn’t make me a better person by any means. I don’t think it’s necessary to cite specifics, but I am still jealous, vindictive, and judgmental deep, deep down. I’m never going to be a good person, but I can sure as hell make you believe I am.
Clarity is both an amazing and frightening thing. It’s amazing, the possibilities out there, how much can come to you if you do one thing right. Frightening is the opposite. With so much to gain, there is so much to lose. Foresight is what separates the two. You draw from past experiences, glean the meaning of the bigger picture, pick out everything you should not have done in a situation, and everything you should have. (It’s too easy to make big math metaphors, so let’s just pretend I did say something about math and real-world applications. The moral of the story remains the same.)
Armed with foresight, our chaos butterfly is a little more careful about when and where to flap its wings. Of course, it can’t know everything that happens. Who really does?
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