I would gladly miss the plane....

This is a pure after thought of an urge to speak which wasn’t satisfied, one that was on the tip of my frontal lobe from quite some time now. It’s been months since I first watched Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. These aren’t really two distinct movies. They aren’t movies at all if you ask me. They are a part of our personality, or so to speak humanity (for the lack of a better word), which stand face to face with us, staring right back at us to rethink those priceless moments. The post’s title refers to Ethan Hawke eventually missing the plane going back home, to spend some extra time with this lost love, knowing that it wouldn’t matter, but still would satisfy him for that moment.

One dialog really ticked me off, Julie Delpy says while talking to Ethan Hawke about her childhood memories that, “memory is good as long as we don’t have to deal with the past”. Although her context has roughly no meaning in which I took it, but it felt so true. All the things we thought, felt, experienced are so irrelevant when thought from a rational world view, but seem to mean so much when thought from a sensitive view. 

Five minutes spent with the person you care about the most, money spent on eating that favourite dish at the local snack bar at the exact same moment when you wanted to eat it, being able to board the train that you almost always miss on your way to college, talking for hours and hours with someone who you honestly connected with, being able to say what you mean to someone and getting the exact same response from them, listening to your own heart beat when you press your ear really hard against the bed. All these have absolutely no meaning in the life which is defined by necessity. All these things are immaterial to someone who lives in the moment for the moment and doesn’t want to be bothered about the time spent. But they play a very important part in shaping up the chaos that we call our mind. Every thought, every self reflection is touched by these small experiences which take you closer to defining yourself in your own mind. This time the only thing that seems irrelevant is the present. What I am is the memory of what I was and what I will be is almost like an uncharged electron. 

So many mornings, I woke up to find myself deliberately telling me to get out of bed and do something, anything. Even though I had a well defined day right ahead of me, I used to discard it as morning sickness and used to get along with the routine with that first sip of tea. But after watching Before Sunset, once again, last night, I thought how important that moment is, every morning, when your mind reboots from its dormancy and starts connecting all the dots once again. When you disregard such a moment it certainly destroys that link with the past, which our memories have conjured up for us, to think about, to cherish them, to live that moment in our head and feel contempt of having been there, once again.

How many times has the thought crossed my mind that what I love about myself, is something no one else will appreciate. What I think about myself, is something no one else would be willing to accept. What I think about anything is just someone else’s perception of good or bad and which will certainly result in being my bad judgement. I thought of what Paresh had told me once on the phone last year. “Dude watch this movie (before sunrise), such a movie should only be made in Hollywood, only they know how to make a romantic movie, truly romantic in every sense of the word”. Perhaps he was more right than he knew. It’s not just a movie, after watching the sequel, something changed in me. I had the opportunity of watching both the movies back to back, and something definitely happened in that grey area. I wasn’t anticipating such a delightful flow of thought. When so many things keep our minds mired with just in time thoughts, we oddly even feel the necessity to think about how things could have been. I mean, when Ethan Hawke writes n entire book based on that one night spent with Julie Delpy in Vienna and she writes a song about him, it is about them thinking how things could have been. 

Instead of always staying a little disgruntled, we can always end up taking a course of thought which might satisfy us a little bit every day, just hypothetically, so as to keep that sense of satisfaction alive. Its uncanny how economics imitates life or life imitates economics. It’s about the law of diminishing marginal utility that keeps us in check with our desires that we need to take them in moderate doses so as to satisfy ourselves with that exact amount...