albarrancabrera.
"He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct."
- "In the Mood for Love" (Fa yeung nin wa), written, directed, and produced by Wong Kar-wai
"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our lives is change."
- Daniel Gilbert
Before Gilbert, the poet Robert Penn Warren also meditated on the trouble with "finding yourself." Warren's idea that "the self is a style of being" shifts identity from something fixed and discoverable to something dynamic and participatory. He pushes back against the popular notion of "finding yourself" as though the self were a hidden object waiting to be uncovered. Instead, he suggests that "the self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth...for the self is never to be found, but must be created, not the happy accident of passivity, but the product of a thousand actions, large and small, conscious or unconscious, performed not 'away from it all,' but in the face of ’it all,' for better or for worse, in work and leisure rather than in free time." In other words, we do not locate a finished self; we practice one into being.
We are not made of fixed certainties, but of processes. We are not a label; we are an evolution.
This is you here
#148 Pigments, gampi paper and gold leaf