I have a bad habit—or it seems like it should be a bad habit—of regretting things, or wishing I had made a decision differently. Not unusual, I know. And I know one should be careful what one wishes for. There must be many stories, reiterated over the years of oral traditions since illiterate ancient times, that highlight this point in lessons with varying degrees of harshness. But as my perspective on cause and effect is limited to the parameters of a life lived in the first person, in a physical world, my imagination, my ability to imagine other decisions and other outcomes, also exists within these parameters. And so it is possible, unfortunately, to feel I should have done differently.
This past-facing, useless view burns energy, confuses sleep patterns, and makes it more difficult to look forward to things in the future. My future-tense language hardly gets used in this season, and my head fogs, feels filled with styrofoam; I’ll allow it to be filled so, in as much as anyone can allow what enters ones head to be there.
I took the first photo at a parade honoring New York’s Scottish community, which I happened to stumble upon one day while wandering through Midtown looking for something else. Bagpipe music and tartan were everywhere. The parade’s Grand Marshall was a Scottish actor, who I’d never heard of, who stars in a streaming show I’d never seen. Many onlookers gathered against the aluminum barricades that lined the parade route, yet I suspect many of them were equally wondering “who is this famous man?”