The Open Matt Project

Metronomenclature

In hindsight, most people are able to see what they did right or wrong. Most of the time it seems pretty obvious and it's embarrassing to notice just how easily one could have avoided one's fate. When things go right, often this look back is taken as self-validation or vanity, as if our thoughts and actions were the prime movers of the beneficial result. When things go wrong, we tend to blame everything but ourselves until there is no avoiding our own culpability, at which point we also tend to overexert our senses of shame and regret. Then there's the people who believe in luck and karma, but as they've gracefully bowed out of the game, I'll let them alone.

Depending on how long has passed since a given event, we'll tend to have greater perspective on the elements involved and so feel more confident about judging it. Similarly, the more removed we are from the event, the more we trust our objectivity and so too our ability to reason out the causes and consequences. Time and Distance - one happens simply by living, the other requires substantial effort.

What if you were to shorten the time between retrospectively analyzing the events of your life? What if you stopped at the end of each month and graded your performance? Were you better at life this month? What about last month? Are you congratulating or berating yourself? Do you think if there were a persistent measure of your success or failure, a regular report-card for your life, that it would emphasize your own responsibility, or would it only serve as reflective entertainment? Would it tell you who you are, or who you were?

Since we all reflect on ourselves, and the conditions we find ourselves in, with varying frequency, I don't imagine that regulating that process would be too difficult to imagine. Instead of looking back on those spontaneous occasions, we could look back deliberately. With a schedule.

Now what if we take that schedule and shorten it. Every week, say. Or what about at the end of each day. How did I score today? Did I do better today than the last? Naturally we'd lose some of the perspective of time and distance, but wouldn't we gain a new, perhaps equally valuable perspective? To pay attention to our lives in such a way - wouldn't that bring focus to our hindsight?

If we make it after each meal, or after each hour, or every minute or few seconds - isn't there a point when the rhythm of our self-awareness and desire for improvement and value stops being a beat and suddenly becomes a vibration?

And what would that sound like?

Posted by Matt at July 22, 2004 09:17 PM