walking and falling

[repost from 2005]

There’s a Laurie Anderson song called “Walking and Falling.” In it she says:

You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it,
but you’re always falling.
With each step you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you’re falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
at the same time.

It makes me think of how we move through the present into the future… We are falling into the future and sometimes we catch ourselves in the present by being conscious of a particular moment. But overall it’s a conveyor belt.

I’m always a little sad to lose the person I used to be, part of the reason I document things. There’s a site where you can write your future self a letter that will be sent to you at a time you designate.

In “The Dream Before” Laurie Anderson talks about history:

And he said: History is an angel
being blown backwards into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel
backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm
is called
Progress

It’s hard to fight the storm and live in the moment.