Clichés and Clarity

One sure sign that you're getting old is that clichés begin to make a lot more sense. I've been looking for a new name for this blog, because it seems a waste to always live in anticipation. I'll always be looking forward to better things, when the best things may be happening to me right now. So yeah, embrace the present sounds like pretty solid advice at the moment. But to stop anticipating and just live is to learn to forge ahead in spite of uncertainties. That's a learning process which I suspect will be lifelong for me. 


So I was looking for a name that can convey what I think is important in life and not just in this phase of my life (because I really don't want to change my blog's title every 5 years), and clarity is a word that constantly pops up. 


Clarity to me is to see things as they really are, and know that things are as they should be. And Clarity happens to be my favourite John Mayer song. 


By the time I recognize this moment
This moment will be gone
But I will bend the light, pretend that it somehow lingered on


Those moments are so few and fleeting. But all of us must have experienced them at some point. And this from the Colin Firth film A Single Man expresses it the best:


 A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be. 


Not being able to hold on to these moments, I can live with, because knowing that I once had them matters more. Unlike George in the film, I don't live my life only on them because confusion and perplexity are always there, but in their wake they leave me with hope that I'll live it a little better.