“But it is a general principle that ‘you can’t go home again,’ you can’t really regress, the adult cannot become a child in the strict sense. You can’t ‘undo’ knowledge, you can’t really become innocent again; once you have seen something, you can’t undo the seeing. Knowledge is irreversible, perceiving is irreversible, knowing is irreversible; in this sense you can’t go home again. The only possible alternative for the human being is to understand the possibility of going on ahead, growing older, going on ahead to the second naïveté, to the sophisticated innocence, to the unitive consciousness.” Abraham Maslow
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It’s a strange thing growing up — for you are ever mindful of the trinity within: who you once were, who you are now, and who you could become. And all of these identities are incompatible with each other. Their incongruity rests in the fact that only one of them is actual — the rest are pragmatic fictions. The narrative of your former self is only a tale — its concrete form is in your current habits and predispositions. So too, your future self is a story — but is alive and breathing and is made manifest by choices and decisions. And so our present self is sandwiched between the past and the future, between habits and decisions. And you can never undo a habit. And you can never shy away from decision. And so you must you…
