7 Years / Acid Test
As I thought about what to post next, scrolling through my notes app for old poems that felt like they carried the pulse of this quasi-artistic, heavily intellectual narrative, I thought of what my roommate had mentioned during a conversation we had the night before. I spoke to him about the regret and guilt I had for the mistakes in my past. Being the saint that he is, he told me every 7 years we become different people because the cells in our bodies replace themselves, so that essentially we are built up of entirely different stuff after that span of time. This prompts another question: if that is the case, which I trust him enough to presuppose that it is, then after we turn 7, we are basically constantly changing.
It made me consider how imperative the need to embrace change becomes, like a learnt skill or a muscle that we work only through experiencing life.
It also made me think about how if we are completely different people materially in 7 years, does that mean that’s how long we have to manifest an idea from its inception? How much time do we have between the propulsive energy established from the generation of that idea channeled from our experiences and forms of pattern-recognition to then focus said idea into the various applications at our disposal to build and manifest them into a socially acceptable reality? If this is a rule, and it’s a big “if,” does it strictly occur this way on an individual basis? I think not. I think sharing our experiences in groups—any group, whether it be an AA room or a concert, any gathering en masse—propels the experiences and ideas of individuals into a collective intuition and understanding of the state of ideas. This then becomes an ever-present, reciprocal process.
Take something like the internet. It is a terrifying and marvelous archive of society’s pooled information. If anything, it shows the brand of humanity's cohesion and collaboration, proliferating restlessly to find the next hint of an agreed-upon collective landmark, whether cultural, political, economic, scientific, esoteric, occult, etc.
It makes me hopeful because it’s a meaningful proposition as someone who has had around 10 concussions. Hope that no matter how petrified or tetrified our lives feel over the span of decades, we are radiating and reforming terminally. The only constant is that change is inevitable. It’s what makes the moments of rest and familiarity so cherishable and precious.
I’m probably going to want to edit this later because it won’t make as much sense to me as it does now, but posting at the very least can act as the acid test of my perfectionism, and I can rest easier knowing that today I did enough.