Surprise!

When you ‘get’ something – say a piece of music, art or a movie dialogue, doesn’t it delight you? And then you make your next conversation interesting with snippets of what happened, what you saw and why it was pretty, etc etc. Happiness! It genuinely delights you that there is something so right and so perfect and that you saw it. Wow!

And so over time you know what you will like, what you won’t, read up on it, find out, discuss, share, grow, learn. And you discover more people, artists, dialogues, movies, visuals that are like the ones you love. And so the familiarity and happiness spreads. Suddenly you have woken, you are a conscious person – alive with ideas, thoughts, memories.

And then you start becoming conscious of what you like, even if you haven’t seen it already. Like when you are going to look at the Mona Lisa and know that you are supposed to love it. When you look at a village setting and know that it links you to a past that isn’t yours, frozen in time and was and always will be the way it is. Exists with and without you, but you happen to see it and you know you are supposed to love it, feel relaxed, non-time bound and soak in the space; when you go to watch a comedy; when you are at a music concert. Sure it blows your mind away and it isn’t something you’ve ever heard before and all that jazz. But you know that you are being overwhelmed and you know why it is overwhelming and exactly what about it is overwhelming because that is precisely what is supposed to overwhelm the others as well.

And so you are pandering to the moment of suddenly recognized delight. You are preparing yourself for when you will be taken by surprise. What fun it is going to be! And how??!! Or you assume the convenient and tried and tested posture. You meet a new person. Or an old friend. Or someone you are not supposed to acknowledge something with. Or a bunch you shared something with once. And everyone is talking about what they do now and how they’ve changed. And what surprised them and what didn’t. And everyone collectively knows what to avoid talking about; exactly when to congratulate and when to lend a shoulder.

A massive colossal all encompassing pre-prepared déjà vu-ing of future moments.

And you play the part you know you have to play, want to play and you are genuinely only being yourself. But you already know you will be nostalgic, overwhelmed, surprised, happy, fat, thin, old, bitchy, furtive, ridiculous. And you will make that sudden glance at some spot that meant something to you, or does now because it didn’t mean anything to you then. And you will go everywhere you are supposed to go because you are supposed to be nostalgic and reliving the moments and you will think and remember the right jokes, the right embarrassments, the ‘silly fights’ and you will be grown up, put the past behind and condense the good into that little bubble of happy memories. And you also know how that bubble looks inside your head – the personal getty images log that you have of all the pretty images that were always going to signify ‘past, nostalgia, beautiful, lovely, happy, sad’.

And so you move along in life conscious of being conscious of being conscious.

I’m sorry, were you living in the moment right now? Awwwh!