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Think of your favourite album, one that you've heard many times. Think about the intensity of the feelings you felt when you first heard that album. Now compare that to how you feel when you hear it the third, forth, or fiftieth time. It's different, isn't it?
Once we experience something, our perspective of the world forever changes.
I found a very interesting book called Stumbling on Happiness. Despite its title, it's not a self-help book. It's really a science book. The title promises something that its first chapter tells you it will not help you achieve. Here's an excerpt:
"Once we have an experience, we can't simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.... Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present, and future. And like any lens, they shape and distort what we see. This lens is not like a pair of spectacles that we can set on the night stand when we find it convenient to do so. But like a pair of contacts that are forever fixed to our eyeballs with super glue.
Once we learn to read we can never again see letters as mere inky squiggles. Once we learn about free jazz we can never again hear Ornette Coleman's saxophone as a source of noise. Once we learn that Van Gogh was a mental patient or that Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite we can never again view their art in the same way."
If you've never had your heart broken or suffered the loss of a loved one, it's difficult to empathize when your friend sobs in his beer telling you his hard-luck story. But once you've had your own heart torn in two, you can literally feel how he feels. That's because your life is now colored by your experience.
The Down-Side of Experience
I wish I could go back to that time when I first heard John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. I felt so excited. This was something that I never heard before. I couldn't believe my ears! I was 16 or so and I laid down on my bed and closed my eyes and just listened. It was an incredible experience.
After that first listen, each subsequent listen is different. My experience of it will always be different. I can never hear it again for the first time (unless of course they invent a machine that can erase those memories which store all the times I have listened to A Love Supreme, similar to Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Now that I've listened to A Love Supreme hundreds of times, I still enjoy listening to it but it doesn't bring the same intensity of feelings that it did the first time.
What's even worse, there are still several Coltrane recordings out there that I have not heard, but because I'm now intimately acquainted with Coltrane's style of music, listening to other recordings of his that I have yet to hear still doesn't bring about the same degree of excitement.
Once you have experienced something so great, you are in some way ruined by it because you'll never get to feel that way again. Like a junkie doing whatever he can to get his next fix, constantly seeking the best "high," we are going about our lives trying to feel excited again, to feel the way we did when we first ate a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich (yum!), or to feel the way we did the first time we kissed someone (butterflies!), or deposited our first pay cheque (pride), or had sex ($&$%*!), or fell in love ($&$%*!). I guess we are all junkies, only our drug is the elusive "happiness" which none of us can seem to define with any accuracy.
We keep chasing these moments in our lives to try to relive them.
I'm chasing another Coltrane. If you know of him or her, please let me know.
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