190. Catching up before the 2024 countdown
Source: TV Tropes- Toast of Tardiness from the anime, "Daily Lives of High School Boys"
I think catching up became a bit of a life theme lately, like an endless marathon where the finish line keeps moving back. Not a "let's grab coffee and catch up" kind of 'catching up' (though, I believe I'm overdue on plenty of those!), but more of the catching up with myself. There's an endless parade of ideas that demand to be written down immediately, but I realize that I think these things need to be felt immediately, first. Moments demand attention. There's a strange urgency in it, like if I don't jot it all down now, then I'll lose the thread of what it meant to me in the first place.
deranged incomplete thoughts???
I told misu I need to catch up today and... yeah. It seems like I always have the urge to capture everything instantly, like if I don't jot it down, then that particular thought, observation, or feeling like slip into the abyss of forgotten epiphanies, like shower thoughts swirling down the drain. Sometimes it does, but sometimes when I look back at what I've written, it's like staring at an old diary entry. The words are there, the moment is frozen in time, but that the emotional charge? It's there, but it's dimmed.
Another friend of mine and I had a discussion about this recently actually, then we got into a philosophical rabbit hole about how time changes the way we see things. We agreed that reflection is an active process - you let life marinate for a bit, the meaning deepens or shifts, but sometimes it just vanishes. Yeah, you might not feel the same after, and sure, that happens sometimes. Thoughts mellow, moments warp, and the "hotness" and "heat" of the emotions cools into a ζΈ©γ (nurui) 1 - but that's not the whole story.
Sometimes, some things stick, unchanged. I've read past writings and watched old videos and photos that hit me like a dΓ©jΓ vu. It's not because I forgot those moments, but because I havenβt outgrown them or perhaps I can transport myself like a time traveler to that very moment? I like the time traveling bit. There are fragments of thought that I catch up to months later, only to find that these thoughts evolved into something I wouldn't recognize if I didn't know where they came from.
Catching up is its own kind of work. It's trying to keep pace with myself, unsure whether I'm moving towards something new or circling back to what I've always been. For me, it's striking the balance between the urgency to capture and the grace to let time do its own thing. Just sit with a thought, would it grow or evaporate? Would I even care? How to trust that the thoughts worth keeping will stick around, even if I don't rush to pin them down.
I have come to realize and conclude with this - Maybe the thing about catching up is that it leaves little room for reflection. Catching up is fine, but it's not everything. When you're constantly in motion, you don't have time to stop and really sit what you've caught. So here I am, writing this- not to catch up, but to pause. To reflect on the chasing and the catching. I think that's the point of it, right? To not always be ahead or behind, but to be here, wherever and whenever that is.
Happy New Year my friends! Can't wait for 2025 :)
~ a celebrator,
<3 K
π https://marblethoughts.bearblog.dev/
ζΈ©γ (γ¬γγ) (nurui) - [adjective] lukewarm, tepid, stupid- but this adjective was described by my dad as "lukewarm, but it's kind of a bad quality lukewarm - like the quality of the thing was turned down because it cooled down" and I thought that this word best described what I was trying to say.↩