Consider a definition of maturity – ‘understanding the value of what one has lost.’
This is my own definition. I want to explain it, if I can.
To understand the value of what one has lost is not merely to understand what’s lost in itself – it is to know what it was once worth. For this quality, whatever it might be—a perception, a source of confidence, a treasured possession, or an emotional bedrock—must first disappear, and then its value—that which it gave in return for your attention—may be understood.
(How do you quantify the value of what you once had, except by noting what remains after it’s gone? To define is to compare, to cut off, etc.)
I am beginning to suspect maturity leaves one with nothing. I, for example, have lost many qualities I would once have considered fundamental to my sense of self. Yet here I remain. And the realisation hits me that these things by which we define ourselves, our sacrifices to time, are mere labels, and the self can only be discovered when we die. (I once thought it could be recorded as an epigram, if a ‘skilled observer’ were present at the time of death.)
I hesitate, then, to talk about what ‘remains’, because I’m by no means near natural death, and there’s no guarantee that what I perceive now might actually remain. However, I have observed two constants in life. First, the usefulness of constant reflection on one’s experience. Second, that the best assumption I can make in any situation is that I don’t understand something. Of course, these are pieces of wisdom I borrowed, and they’re so old as to be truisms. This, however, doesn’t make them any less worth repeating.
Experience is never set, as each recollection of a memory changes it. Therefore, life can be described as an ever-shifting vision, without particular setting, theme, character, or message. And to assume one doesn’t understand something is just good practice. Because we simply don’t ‘understand’ anything. (You can’t share axons with the other brains.)
It is also necessary to talk about ‘loss.’ By definition, what’s lost can’t be retrieved. It’s not ‘misplaced.’ A memory is a dead thing. It’s not static—it’s shifted by neural waters—but it’s still dead. And it’s only once something is lost that it assumes an untouchable character and becomes a memory.
Since it can’t be touched, it becomes sacred.
When something is lost, its role in your life is that of a ‘finished’ object, finished in a divine way, like Zeus and Jesus were considered finished. ‘Teleosis’, it’s called in all the old philosophy: a word that nowadays means organic perfection, but once meant ‘an accomplishment, a fulfilment, an event which verified a promise.’ What you have lost can be inspected, remembered, analysed from all sides, for it has become a ‘complete’ object. It is a story which can be told with a beginning, middle, and ending.
Such is the value of what you have lost—sacred value. Even if you didn’t value it, and you chose to lose it. The thing itself is replaced by an image of the thing, for you to give your attention. The following is from Simone Weil: to pay attention to something is to pray to it. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”
As such, we must on some level consider our memories sacred objects. And how else could we treat them, since they make us what we are?
As you remember an image over and over again, you polish it with your memory until you wear off the varnish and the image changes with age. When you brood over what you’ve lost, past the point where insight can be gained, it’s being over-polished, and the point of your past is being lost to time. Because the point of your past is you, and you’re losing your current self in your own reflections. Some tragic event happened in the past and you were damaged. And now, you’re in danger of brooding on it, letting some dark egg hatch within your mind and grow into a psychologically lethal chicken, until you reflect on it properly.
How does one escape this trap? By application; by understanding the current value of what’s been lost.
To brood is to think ‘about’. To reflect is to think ‘beyond’. One mustn’t brood on the past, which is now an ideal, and a mere theory, but apply the lessons learned which show they understand the value of how things once were (call that, if you like, ‘sacred innocence’). To ‘re-member’, literally, is to give a member, or a limb, back to something, to allow it to act in the world again.
“Once we understand the events that happen to us, those events become history. Otherwise, we’re just animals trying to get out of the cold.” [read: we are immature, we have learned nothing]. But it is also equally necessary to understand that you can’t understand anything—the second truism—because interpretation can go on infinitely, wear down a memory to nothing, and leave you nowhere, adrift in a sea of unconnected, abstract reflections.
Like all real advancements in life, it sounds like some kind of paradox. You have to try to understand your own past, while knowing that you can’t do so. But the application in life is the true test.
verso folio 