On the Long Brown Path

I was driving in the car this afternoon and heard Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Albert in his post wrote that "...music plays such an integral role in changing emotion," and listening to that song, it seemed as if in that moment I was listening to that song across time, at all moments when then song had ever been played. Time for a moment was non-linear. I remembered myself at the summer camp I'd gone to for three years. In flashes, I was walking across the footbridge over the highway, in a crowd, right from lunch, listening to my iPod, that song. I remembered the air at the moment clearly, the green shorts I was wearing, weighed down embarrasingly by the iPod, the flip-flops and my glance over campus and environs. Overlayed on top came crashing images of next year at the same place, sliding from my eyes to the pit of my stomach, tossed with discomfort with the ideas I'd had, or hadn't, the friends not talked to, the chances missed and promised unkept.

A few seconds later it passed as the past's future interceded, reminding me somewhat of why things ended up the way they did. And yet, I had regret. When Thoreau says "live deliberately," it means to me not to go what every your will takes you, not to live in the moment, but something different. Rather, to live as if the past is past, live in the future, live around the moment. Be struck by choices, not years later, but as they occur. At every moment, consider not what you're doing, that's just maturity, but also your whole future laid out at your feet, but wrapping around and back. Consider each and every shadow cast by various lights, trained on the multifarious future. Live deliberately now, so you can understand that the regrets you're left with are just mementos and should be cherished.

That's a different kind of maturity. Listening to Bob Dylan from 1965 is a fascinatingly different experience to listening to Bob Dylan from 2006. The former is exuberant, idealistic, angrily idealistic even as he sings about disillusionment. And this is not a case of falling from innocence, that idiotic notion of "high ideals" that fail at a moment's notice, a case that gives those comfortably living decades, centuries later a warm fuzzy feeling of superiority. Bob Dylan of 2006 sings about walking in a weary world of woe, but it isn't because he's become distanced from his earlier idealism, but because he understands why the world is weary and woeful and that he's just as much to blame as anyone else. He can put himself now, not just in Medgar Evars shoes, Hollis Brown's shoes, Emmet Till's shoes, as he did in the 60's and not just in his own shoes, but in the shoes of the lynchers, the murderers, the man in government, whatever, even the most unromantic. He's not happy, he's not even accepting, but he understands why someone might do the things they do, if only in feelings, not by circumstances. They become part of him, it's all part of the world, and as a poet, nothing can be excluded. He won't denounce, but understand as completely as they themselves could, however he feels.

Therefore, we should all be poets, at some level, inside. Maybe not with such an expansive scope, but at least turn your undestanding inward, at every moment, living around the moment, considering it from angles never thought of, new patterns never considered, as if in the future. That's why it's so hard, but it doesn't matter. To live deliberately is to fail and have sweet regrets.