The Greatest Movie... No One Else Will Ever See...
There is a movie filled with fantastic, inspiring moments, dramatic twists and turns, disappointments and tragedy, love and retribution, monotony and intensity, transformative worldviews, subtle moments beyond compare, and awe-inspiring revelations... This is a movie you have already seen and have yet to see... It's the greatest movie you'll ever come across: The Life of You.
It's a bummer no one else can watch your movie, but there is so much you have in your archive waiting to reappear and be shared in a way neither you nor anyone else could have ever imagined. I mean, the brain literally rediscovers itself by recalling a memory and reimagining it in a way that it had never imagined before. A recalled memory is never thought of the same way. With a brain that consistently layers on information, our values and ideas are altered by the new concepts learned every moment (independent of whether it is subtle or dramatic). So every moment we grasp something new and are something new.
We are never the same person we were a second ago. I like to think of the time when I was ten sitting in the backseat of my mom's old Volvo. I remember staring blankly through the window at the cars passing by, and suddenly a thought crossed my mind: I past. Then I quickly turned around trying to see where I had been only moments before and thinking that I was no longer there... I was here. I no longer existed as that person several seconds ago. It was the first time I felt time pass. And it made me anxious, like I was moving out of time to exist. Occasionally, I would be afraid to move knowing that I ceased to exist as the person I knew in every movement, every moment. It was difficult for me to see that I wasn't merely disappearing; I was actually becoming, gaining a new layer of me, growing in consciousness just by existing and experiencing.
We are layering on new experiences every moment. Our memory is like a painting with a canvas increasing in all directions with paint layering upon layer in different ways (it could have thin watery marks, thick smudges, clear shapes or sharp lines, etc.). We aren't really losing any memory, we're just not remembering those experiences right now. And even if we do remember them, it's not the same as reliving them. Reliving an experience would, in fact, mean that we would have to lose any experience gained after that event, so that we could relive that experience with the same mindset and feelings as before. So okay, that you from the past will never exist again in the way you experienced it the first time, but it isn't lost. It's... repurposed and rediscovered and reevaluated and remembered in a way that builds upon your movie or painting or any other analogy that works for you.
And that's the greatest thing: It's for you. Everything you experience whether you consider it good or bad, is an experience of you. It is a magnificent story filled with discomfort and comfort, intense solo missions of self discovery, nonsensical "hilariee", hopelessness in tragedy, or periods of silence and rest that is uniquely for you. It is difficult to step back and see experience as magnificent growth (independent of how we feel about it). That's because there is so much emotion in experience that it's difficult to see the experience as this extension of our growing beings. It is a shame that we have been conditioned since birth to believe that happiness is the emotion we should experience all the time. Happiness is sold to us in every shape, medium, and form in our society. And it is so easy to be complacent and accept the false needs our society feeds us.
The big lie: happiness is achievable all the time. What I have learned about emotions is that they will always be inconsistent and undependable. It doesn't matter how wonderful or terrible they may be; they will never remain. I've realized that any one emotion (like happiness) is never constant, and I can free myself from the burden of seeking out what is truly unattainable by simply not seeking it. I can relish in it when it happens, and accept it when it flees. The waves of emotion are beyond my control. My experience is dependent on how I become aware of these emotions and react to them. The waves will always push me this way and that... do I choose to fight them or let them move through me? If I let go the pressures to experience a certain way and let the myself just experience, there is an acceptance that brings me much contentment.
There are many things that I have become content with just by simply accepting the movement of time. It helps me to think I have died and been reborn in every moment because in every moment I am becoming anew just by existing. In this way, I don't quite fear death because I've died a trillion times over. And every experience is followed by an emotion. The emotion can either overtake the experience, or it can exist in harmony with awareness and acceptance of it. And new awareness inspires me to move because I have a chance to grow and change the course of my being in every dying breath.