tango

"..tango imparts all the certainty of the past, and all of the openness of the future."

-The Music of the Tango, Ted Gioia

The past is the most comfortable home in which my mind resides. People and places and thoughts and emotions rush back to me without a moment's notice. I'm sentimental, nostalgic.. I long for the past in a way that I never long for the future. It holds within its sometimes fuzzy memories everything and anything certain in my life. The present and future promise nothing of the past's fearlessness and warmth.

The certainty I have about the past isn't just surety of how the story goes. First of all, I can see myself and all that I am distinctly. I can look back, with perhaps more understanding, and see who exactly made those choices and why. My self, my mind, my soul, my hopes and dreams all become immensely clear when crystallized in the past. I don't have to wonder, like right now or right now, what exactly makes me me or who exactly I am. Am I my consciousness? Am I a soul? Am I my soul? Am I a mind? Am I reason? Am I a sack of cells waiting to die?

My memories don't just provide a photograph of my heart's topography at the time--they drive my actions in the present. What kind of memory will this make? Making decisions like this is moving forward while facing backward. Which way should I face? Here, I am looking and delving into what I have learned and what I know for certain. If I made decisions looking toward a hazy and perhaps grimy future, I may make mistakes that I could have avoided. Of course, I am afraid of failure; the error would be willfully blind if I chose to risk present action without an eye to the past. My knowledge in the present is far too inadequate to accurately determine actions. To fail in willful ignorance, or to fail by miscalculation? The past encompasses both my life rushed past and my life rushing onward.

Whatever is in the past, it is in my past. I have no fear, no inhibition, no hesitation in memories. I can traverse the minefield of my memories without recourse. Even in the times where I screwed up, I know that I end up here. The memories don't stop, they don't falter. I might remember every mistake, but none of them were big enough to prevent me from making more memories right alongside them. Somehow this fact is reassuring, comfortable. I feel safe locked away in the bookshelves of the past. Embracing me.

"Nostalgia - it’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved." via stellarstuff

And the embrace of tango.. close, I can feel your breath change with the rhythm.

Tango is about years of tradition and culture embodied in music and movement. My life is a culmination of successes and failures and getting all tangled up in my own tango. I don’t know who is leading yet, or where we’re going, but the music is beautiful. The beat is heavy. I can’t see what is in front of us; I can only watch, with my cheek pressed urgently to yours, the glow of the path behind us and the beauty of our dance. Hold me close.