Watch...Feel...
Apr. 8th, 2007 12:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magicaddict...remember...continue.
When it's dark, and the daemons come, what do you see?
Death, yours or others? Darkness you hide from yourself? Shades of love, lost or killed? The memory of a smile turning sour? Decisions, good or bad, pivotal or inconsequential, that paid dividends or didn't?
Strangely enough, I don't. Not any more.
When you have lived long enough to see friends grow old and die, nations come and go, and what was once abhorrent become acceptable, there isn't a great deal that those daemons can show you that you haven't experienced in more crystal clarity than they could ever recreate. You can stare them down with sheer bloody-minded acceptance of what they force upon you for long enough that they go and plague someone else. It is liberating and depressing, all at once.
Perhaps when you dream of the past, it is to remind you that you are still alive; that you are still vital and have an unequivocally defined goal that you must strive towards or lose yourself in failure. Perhaps it is to remind you that no matter what you do, what you achieve, you are still no more than what lies in your history.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps you can become more than the sum of your experiences. Perhaps it is possible to transcend all that you have been and rise above yourself; to enter your own fourth dimension, beyond the length, breadth and depth of your life, and truly understand what it is to take your past, present and future, and use them as discrete and separate tools in the pursuit of that which you want the most.
A wise, and old, mage once said, "It is not down to you to change your life." At the time, I thought she meant that you had to react to the deeds of other people; that only by gauging your actions based upon the situation presented to you by those you interact with can you grow and evolve.
For certain, I was naïve back then.
She's dead, now. She died over three hundred and fifty years ago. She was dead by the time I realised what she meant, which, while a pity that I wasn't able to demonstrate that I had gained understanding of her words, is overshadowed by the fact that I wasn't able to tell her how fundamentally I agreed with her. You do not change yourself. Others do not change you either. The concept of changing who you are is redundant, almost entirely.
It is down to you to define who you are.
Something as singular and unique as a person's life is beyond the capacity of another, or even the person themselves, to change. Everything that someone does, regardless of what it is and how much it may contrast with that which they have done before, is another part of the definition of who they are. If you have a thousand ones, and suddenly throw in a ten, the average of those is still only one and a few thousandths.
There are those who have argued that this viewpoint means that you are indeed no more, and will never be more, than the sum of your parts. I disagree. I argue that the understanding of this, that what happens in the present is added to that which has happened before, and together they can be used to affect the future, means you have ascended way above and beyond the shackles of your own history.
Don't change me. Add to me. Do what you will to me, be it good or bad, seemingly pointless or utterly paradigm shifting, and watch it become part of the definition of who, of what, I am. Perhaps that is why the daemons have such little luck with me. I do not claim to be proud of the vast majority of my history, but nor do I seek to hide from it, what it has made of me today and what I intend to do with it tomorrow. There is nothing I wish to deny in what I have done, what I do now, or what I wish to do in the future.
At least, nothing I wish to deny to myself.
When it's dark, and the daemons come, what do you see?
Death, yours or others? Darkness you hide from yourself? Shades of love, lost or killed? The memory of a smile turning sour? Decisions, good or bad, pivotal or inconsequential, that paid dividends or didn't?
Strangely enough, I don't. Not any more.
When you have lived long enough to see friends grow old and die, nations come and go, and what was once abhorrent become acceptable, there isn't a great deal that those daemons can show you that you haven't experienced in more crystal clarity than they could ever recreate. You can stare them down with sheer bloody-minded acceptance of what they force upon you for long enough that they go and plague someone else. It is liberating and depressing, all at once.
Perhaps when you dream of the past, it is to remind you that you are still alive; that you are still vital and have an unequivocally defined goal that you must strive towards or lose yourself in failure. Perhaps it is to remind you that no matter what you do, what you achieve, you are still no more than what lies in your history.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps you can become more than the sum of your experiences. Perhaps it is possible to transcend all that you have been and rise above yourself; to enter your own fourth dimension, beyond the length, breadth and depth of your life, and truly understand what it is to take your past, present and future, and use them as discrete and separate tools in the pursuit of that which you want the most.
A wise, and old, mage once said, "It is not down to you to change your life." At the time, I thought she meant that you had to react to the deeds of other people; that only by gauging your actions based upon the situation presented to you by those you interact with can you grow and evolve.
For certain, I was naïve back then.
She's dead, now. She died over three hundred and fifty years ago. She was dead by the time I realised what she meant, which, while a pity that I wasn't able to demonstrate that I had gained understanding of her words, is overshadowed by the fact that I wasn't able to tell her how fundamentally I agreed with her. You do not change yourself. Others do not change you either. The concept of changing who you are is redundant, almost entirely.
It is down to you to define who you are.
Something as singular and unique as a person's life is beyond the capacity of another, or even the person themselves, to change. Everything that someone does, regardless of what it is and how much it may contrast with that which they have done before, is another part of the definition of who they are. If you have a thousand ones, and suddenly throw in a ten, the average of those is still only one and a few thousandths.
There are those who have argued that this viewpoint means that you are indeed no more, and will never be more, than the sum of your parts. I disagree. I argue that the understanding of this, that what happens in the present is added to that which has happened before, and together they can be used to affect the future, means you have ascended way above and beyond the shackles of your own history.
Don't change me. Add to me. Do what you will to me, be it good or bad, seemingly pointless or utterly paradigm shifting, and watch it become part of the definition of who, of what, I am. Perhaps that is why the daemons have such little luck with me. I do not claim to be proud of the vast majority of my history, but nor do I seek to hide from it, what it has made of me today and what I intend to do with it tomorrow. There is nothing I wish to deny in what I have done, what I do now, or what I wish to do in the future.
At least, nothing I wish to deny to myself.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-04-08 10:32 pm (UTC)IC as who? I've run through all you existing live characters and none of them fit.
Is this the beginning of Revek? or possibly a Vampire LARP character?
no subject
Date: 2007-04-08 10:55 pm (UTC)