The Regret. “We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets.” This is what the most beautiful woman in the world, the absolute myth of kennedyenne America, the ultimate Star, Marylin Monroe, seems to have expressed on the right modus vivendi. How many times you fear that what you did or did not, which is even worse, was not sufficient to reach a certain result you aimed at – eventually claimed according to rationales and rights lacking of any scientific basis or reality – and therefore you awfully blame yourself not to have really exploited your life, not to have lived your life out? Many if you are highly nostalgic and sensitive, few or none (these latest I envy!) if you are icy, or even unsentimental (see weekly theme dated June 18/24), or simply concrete, rational and wisely addressed to present and future. Actually, present is the only certainty we have and it’s the life we are living, meaning the only life we can manage: like someone reminded us of,”tomorrow’s promised to no one”. (Lorenzo the Magnificent: “Beautiful is tender youth, no man can stop her fly! Enjoy today, because you never know about tomorrow”). After all, the latin poet Horace in his well-known Ode 1, 11 urged us to seize the day and count as less as possible on the future: “carpe diem quam minimum credula postero”. And here, in spite of his pessimism, I wanna mention the greatest 1900 Italian Poet, who also an ancestor of mine, the count Giacomo Leopardi, who said “Pleasure is always in the past or in the future, never in the present” and “The past you remember is better-looking than the present, as well as the future you imagine. Why? Because only the present is designed by the humans as whatever it really is; it’s the sole picture of truth, of the real; and anything real is ugly”. In the ever-recurring cycles of human history, some great minds revealed the truth on the way of living of human beings, especially when thy are sensitive and insightful: attachment to the past with doubts and questions, fear of the future with either hope or pessimism, management of the present with rationality and with a proactive or rather a passive attitude toward their goals. The movie this theme reminds me of is: SLIDING DOORS, written and directed in 1998 by Peter Howitt, at his (successful!) debut as a director, and interpreted by young Gwyneth Paltrow struggling with a subway which sliding doors close before or after the people can get inside and therefore represent the variations in life: life can change suddenly and radically. Ella, Paltrow’s character, happens to catch the train – risking the opposite due to a series of events first of which her earring dropped in the office elevator.. – and catch her boyfriend cheating on her or, viceversa, to miss the train and not discovering her boyfriend betrayal or better not right away (she will afterwards anyway). At a point, the 2 paths come together like if the movie message was in conclusion that we cannot control 100% our lives even though they might undergo big or small variations also due to or thanks to us. Hence, going back to the weekly theme, perhaps to regret is nonsense if we think that what we did in the past was what we could actually do, for which reason we would most likely do it again. And even our past choices had been different, perhaps our final result would have been pretty much the same. I am sure of the ‘homo faber’ theory, but the outside world is not under our (full) control, nor our lives. Luckily!
Trailer En: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u7akRLnGyk
