The last days of October are usually
the most beautiful and charming days of the year. The sun tries one last time
more than rather hard to win the simply lost battle against the winter storms,
showing us the little power it emphasizes. With the change of seasons and the
detested backshift of time it is safe: Darkness does have us back and the first
smell of snow blowing down from the glaciers of the Alps overruns the city’s
heart. Every year this special sensation catches us again fully unprepared as
we’ve grown accustomed this easily to our beloved days in July, but what are
those customs we are hope- or hatefully addicted to? And why are we therefore
in a state of mind we want the break button to be held? Those situations in
between we maybe forgot to appreciate this outstanding moment but were still
able to think and even rethink every thing out of the box besides the moment we
actually should.
I wonder why we regret such
movements as it is in our hands to decide. Are regrets lessons we have to learn
in order to realize what we had to do, to become a better or let us say more
grown-up person? Maybe it is regrets leading us to let a chance pass by out of
our habitude to customs. George Bernhard Shaw reworked the great Greek Myth
about Pygmalion at the beginning of the 20th century caricaturing
London’s society. One of the world’s most famous musicals was the final product
of Shaw’s oeuvre – My Fair Lady, making impeccable Audrey Hepburn the one and
only Eliza Doolittle. It is the very final scene of this piece of art bringing
us back to the custom issue. Higgins, the grumpy phonetic-teacher, known as
woman hater and treating Eliza the whole piece as a subject of science and of
own success sings the following phrase after she left him for maybe ever:
I was serenely independent and content before we met
Surely I could always be that way again but yet
I’ve grown accustomed to her look, her voice, her face
Impalpable things – like the light
coming down from a distant star is – do make us regret, often too late to maybe
change things in a way round we might not be left without even having known
what we had to lose. It is easy criticizing the world around us but it may not
be that easy seeing criticism in our regrets, as they are and stay the things
we had to walk through in order to even give us the possibility to be sorry
for. We may make these errors but should always know never to carry them
forward, seeing the future but feeling the past. The only thing we may overpower our customs is the moment we have to tell someone the way we feel for
her. I am afraid that this will be the only serious regret we might announce
looking back on our lives one day – that too often when we loved, we kept
silent.
Cheers
Lorax
