Via Boing Boing, I found this page about a life in pictures… In many ways, I find this a very melancholy story: a woman’s whole life, from infancy to old age, recorded in photographs. Stored together in a box, they were found for sale in a flea market. Who was she? We don’t know – there’s no name on any of the photos… so, troping the title of an old Avengers novel, I think of her as Gloria Monday.
It does make me feel sad, looking over these pictures. I’m certainly guessing here, but I kind of get the feeling that a light goes out in her teens… afterwards, it seems, she seeks approval through her clothes… “Look at me, I am pretty, I am“…. Never anyone else in the pictures, just her… getting older, sadder maybe, defiantly dressing up in yesterday’s finery to keep age at bay? Was she alone? If there was a family, would they have thrown out all of her life’s pictures? Surely not…. she must have been alone.
Is this a sad story? Ask yourself what response you have to this, and what are the reasons you feel that way…. For me, I’m reminded that it’s futile to define ourselves through our looks, through other people’s opinion of us… There’s no point looking backwards, at how youthful, and good-looking we once were. No point fretting about the future – will I look better, or be more popular, if I wear this, or that… We get older, weaker, frailer, uglier… we can’t fight time any more than Canute could resist the tide. So stop worrying about it! Will we die alone? Will we be remembered? We should not consider such things important.
I remember Maya Deren writing in Divine Horsemen about the relationship between the living and the loa, the voudun spirits. As I recall, it was like this: we live, then die. Our friends and children remember us as we were, simplifying us into stories of our lives. Our personalities fade from memory; our attributes are simplified -we were happy, sad, angry, covetous, generous… Our grandchildren may remember us from our lifetime; more likely, they just know the stories they were told about us, which change, are moving into myth, the way we were is stripped down to fit our culture’s archetypes. Our great-grandchildren don’t remember us at all; our stories just form a few small strands of the rope connecting the living with the forgotten dead of our culture. The loa, in Deren’s telling, represent the personality archetypes of Haitian culture. My point being: we won’t be remembered, not really, not as who we really were. So stop worrying about it. Being single, being attached… same thing.
Reading about Gloria Monday, how many archetypes, or stories of your culture, did you try to fit her into? We shouldn’t try, really. We can accept what we know of her, feel compassion for her, but we shouldn’t judge her, or try to fit her into what we think she should have been.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying: yes, Buddha was right. True happiness doesn’t come from fighting age, from the approval of others, from having lots of friends and family. That’s not to say that these are bad! Readers of my other blog know that I’m totally into a better life through biotechnology (hehehe, another one of my formative film experiences was hearing Roy Batty shout out “I want more life, fucker!“); and who doesn’t like having lots of friends? Staying fit and healthy is good! Having money put away against a rainy day is good! But these things should not define our view of ourselves, or be regarded as the purpose of our life.
True happiness, though, comes from living right here, right now, in the present, not chasing after things that we can’t control. Just deal with what we can control, and become a better person… become a better person, clear out your bad karma without creating more, and the world becomes a better place. Much more satisfying than shopping or fashion 
What else can I say? I agree totally with you.
With the addition that, if we see Yang, we feel Yang, we seek Yang, Yang will come. We can look all the way back or forth, but attatchin our needs to that… well, doesn’t matter much, as an old Replicant fella have said.