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Back In The Saddle

After a brief period of not really wanting to get back into writing, I figured that you’ve got to return to the real world at some point. Why not today?

Not sure if I’ll return to the daily posts quite yet but this is a simple foot back in the door. Or, sitting back in the saddle.

I promised a lot of projects, and my goal is to get them up and running in short order. Let’s take a detour first.

D-Day

Today’s the anniversary of the D-Day landings, which started the Allied land invasion of Europe in WWII. There’s much ado about it going on in the UK at the moment, presumably because it’ll be the last major milestone where there’ll be veterans – or, indeed, anyone – still alive to remember it, because WWII is a huge part of British identity (for now,) and, somewhat more cynically, it’s election year for most of the Western World and if there’s nothing that a politician loves more than attaching themselves to anything for a little positive public sentiment, I’m not sure what it is.

D-Day though; it’s important to remember in the face of whatever obstacles you’re currently facing, you perceive the stakes to be high, and quite rightly, because your life is important and because events that happen in your life are the things that make your experience on this planet what it is. However, there’s perspective to be gained in that whatever’s going on in your life isn’t probably quite as immediate, visceral or as high-stakes as being an eighteen year-old lad in the middle of the night in rough seas, waiting to be launched onto a death-trap beach filled with landmines, barbed wire and angry Germans machine-gunning you.

There’s also a lot to be learned from the past; not just in the big, historical narratives that you can read about, (and are subject to a lot of revision – the history we get isn’t the actual one and nor is the one we tell,) but also in the personal perspectives of the individuals there. The above paragraph, where you put yourself into the shoes of a young man awaiting a D-Day landing, ultimately, is a fiction. The firsthand, real world experience of people who were there paints a far more vivid picture than you can conjure up.

And it’s important to take that in.

Memento Vitae

My grandfather, recently deceased, would have remembered D-Day. He is no longer physically around, and thus cannot regale the family with his memories – those things, seemingly lost forever, and kept only alive to the extent those remaining can pass them on, and they’ll be altered over time as a natural byproduct.

It brings into focus a duty we probably all share; we are all inheritors of memory as well as curators of it. The gift is the inheritance, and the duties are in the curation of memory, the creation of memory, and, later, the bequeathing of memory to others.

Let’s talk about the fun one first.

Carpe Diem

Creation of memory is part of what it fundamentally means to be human. Whether you’re an adrenaline junkie hyper-sensor who lives in, for and of the moment, or an introspective, brooding lives-in-their-head kind of guy/girl, building memories is core to who you are and how you interface with the world.

It’s also anti-aging, pro-cognition, fun and otherwise important to build as many memories as you can. Time passes slower, your brain ages slower, your social bonds are improved, as is your mood, health and so on. Personal memories are the main focus here; you do things, you remember them. But also social memories; remember, we inherit memory and all it entails.

Make memories, understand that your time within a physical body on this planet is limited, but the rest is absolutely not.

Let’s talk about duty.

Better Ideologies

It’s politics season and with that, there’ll be a lot of people upset. You might be scared about going to your in-laws’ house for dinner because there’s the inevitable tussle about this-and-that politically.

And it’s very easy to be cynical about the whole thing; we have a political class that exists for the sake of itself, perpetuates itself for the sake of itself, and, importantly, steals your god-damned money to do stuff that you probably don’t want them to do.

Cynicism doesn’t help, but neither does voting, if we’re honest.

We have immense power to create the future at an individual and social level. A lot of that power lies simply in narrative magic; imagining better worlds, working out how we get to them, and then making them happen. This can be incredibly small scale or it can be large scale.

Small scale changes to reality are more profound than larger ones – and this attitude is why I talked about the D-Day stuff above; what matters more; that we know that one would-be Empire was defeated by some others, or that there were countless thousands of personal triumphs, failures, stories and memories created at that point which endure after those present are gone?

We have the ability to create better stories and thus better futures, and with that ability comes the duty to do so.