Are we merely Memory

“History never repeats itself; man always does.” - Voltaire

Our identities are made up of the stories that we tell ourselves. In the present we are just a sapien, almost identical to the next sapien in the room. But we tell ourselves that we differ a lot from each other, that our race, our cast, our religion, our nationality, our class and n number of other things make us what we are. The things that we are born with or around us in our past, we recall them into the present and use them as a tool to belong. We might not even be affected with any of it, but still it allows us to more easily differentiate ourselves from our own kind and we rely on it. Not on the actions that we have done in life and not from our relationship with the present since that requires more work.

There is an identity of what you are, right here, right now. Its how you act and how you react, yes you might be influenced by the things from your past but you are seldom compelled by it.

Tasks and creations

Working consistently and persistently on tasks can also be a great way to generate new ideas. We often tend to think that sitting in a cottage by the forest, finding the solitude or time to think without any actionable commitments is the only way to come up with creative thoughts. But it is more likely that you will come across an idea in the midst of the ‘doing’. An idea for a film can come up while fixing your bike, looking at a vegetable vendor while doing grocery shopping might inspire a game, cleaning up after your dog might inspire a novella. When you are in the thick of executing something totally unrelated you are unconsciously gathering the raw material for your next project.

When you are amongst people or actionable tasks to do, they bring about a change in the direction of the mind that you otherwise would have to spend a lot of energy to get to. Needless to say, different work cultures, jobs, people, action, take your mind in different directions, some areas you might want to be in and some you don’t.

It is important to be conscious of this and make notes of the ideas that come about. Also to see from afar once in a while whether you need to change what you are ‘doing’ to fulfill your creative direction. Maybe sitting in that empty cabin can really help at that point, to gather and curate your ideas and through them curate your tasks and living

Only if you learn

What does not kill me, makes me stronger - Nietzsche

I recently noticed that its not ‘you’ in the quote its ’me’. Nietzsche refers to himself, knowing he has the capacity to learn from his failings and change himself to be stronger. He knows that he can use the failures as the raw material to provide himself a strength which he never had before. He knows he has the humility to learn.

If we think that anything that affects us detrimentally, by its own happening, makes us stronger, we are wrong. We more often than not, don’t take it as a lesson to constructively build upon. We can ignore it, we can deny it, we can excuse ourselves behind the myriad factors that govern our lives but as long as we don’t actively seek to learn from it, the happening weakens us instead of making us stronger. We lose the opportunity that it generously provides through our lack of humility.