Return

“All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again”           (Peter Pan, Walt Disney Film 1953)

After a very blustery week of walking over leaf covered pavements I’ve decided that autumn is my favourite season.     Unlike spring and summer where things feel new, autumn is like a homecoming where we come back round again.     Suddenly it’s cold and dark, the trees are bare and the layers of clothes have doubled, Christmas is within sight and another year is almost over.      The planet has gone round full circle, according to clock time that is.     Lived time, where a minute can feel like fifty or an hour dreaming was really ten minutes, has no knowledge of dates and calendars.     Lived time does not come round again; it is irreplaceable, irrecoverable and irretraceable.     Not that that stops us from trying to do all three and who could blame us, being human is so vast and fast that if there is ever an invention to freeze time now and then so as to catch up a bit I’m sure we’ll all be putting it on our wish lists.       

Obviously it is autumn again but only in terms of the date.     The seasons come and go over and over but they are never the same as their predecessors, no two autumns or springs even come close to each other; they return but they do not repeat.   Every second of time, everything that we say or do, every thought or feeling we have is completely unique and new, it is our memory that joins the dots and gives our experience cohesive meaning.     The first time we experience something will also be the last time we experience it in that way, you can’t repeat originality as so many artists painfully know.   

But you can attempt to recreate a repeat as Harold Ramis tried to do very nicely in the 1993 film ‘Groundhog Day’.       As Bill Murray wakes up to the same day everyday where the exact same events take place in the same way that they did the day before although it’s not really the day before because it’s the same day being repeated....well you know what I mean!    What’s interesting is that the only thing that tells us repetition has taken place is the fact that Bill Murray is the one person that is not repeating himself.     For him time has moved on although he’s stuck in the same day having to live it again and again.      The film is not about repetition at all it is about quite the opposite, about learning new things and developing a new way of being made possible only through reliving it.     Is this not the formula for experience?      Even repetitive patterns are never repeated in the exact same way, the gist may be similar but the variables always vary.     As I write this post I am concurrently revisiting an old essay I once wrote about ‘reliving experiences’.     Flicking through its pages now I’m wondering if I were to rehash my old words for this blog would I be repeating myself or recycling?!      Going back to things is not the same as repeating them because something will always be different, time will make sure of that.     It is not Christmas again or ones birthday again, it is a new and different event each time.     

It has gotten dark outside as I’ve been writing this and I hadn’t noticed until now that I stopped to look, a bit like autumn really.      What is it about autumn, it’s rife with nostalgia.