Before transformation I was surviving. I was surviving and I didn't
know that's what I was doing. That's what I thought living was. But
it isn't. For me, surviving was living - that is to say, surviving
was synonymous with living. There wasn't any
difference between surviving and living before transformation.
It was worse than that actually. Before transformation I didn't
even have a distinction surviving. There was
only living ... and there wasn't anything else - so it
was undistinguished living to boot. With
transformation came distinction, and with distinction came
the recognition of surviving. Indeed, with distinction came the
recognition of the possibility of living distinct from
surviving. That may sound like an oversimplification
of transformation. But for the most part, that's transformation ie
that's
what's so
about transformation.
With transformation comes the possibility of possibility
itself. There's no possibility in surviving. That (I learned
later) is the essential distinction between survival, and
moved to
tears,
real, quickening of breath, thrilling, heart in your
mouth living. In my life, when there's no possibility of
possibility itself, in other words when living
is surviving, all that seems to be available to
me ie the only raw material I can ever get my hands on
to build something new with, is whatever's the logical continuation
of something that happened in the past.
With that fixed perspective (unknowingly to me) bolted and welded
into place in my
epistemology,
what masqueraded as living in the present was really little more
than extending the past, building on the past, and (remember, this
is survival after all) learning from the past.
Learning from the past includes both capitalizing on the past as
well as improving the past. In many cases (truth be told),
improving the past means avoiding the past entirely.
And all the while, there isn't any distinction between continuing
something that happened in the past, capitalizing on the past,
improving the past, or avoiding the past. It's all glommed
together in an amorphous undistinguished mass I called
living.
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