Raindancing in a Desert Through a Timewarp

You are a one-way Time machine headed ever deeper into the future. Time wedges itself between you and the past and grows, pushing you further apart. That distance doesn’t generate clarity or insight, but it can be a room where Hope and Disappointment learn how to have a conversation, so Hope doesn’t grow up to be Expectation or Attachment. Complicating matters, your central processor can glitch: interrupted interpretations, inventing false inventory, introducing a retroactive, unintentional attention intervention. Hindsight 2.0 is not effective antivirus prevention as advertised. It’s not even fog repellent. Conversely, memories re-organize themselves to fit a storyline that’s updating in realtime. You have to switch to manual mode to get a different result, and it’s tricky. When correct verdicts get reversed, continuity gets corrupted, and you get stuck on autopilot. You’re programmed for defragmentation, but that's tricky, too.
 
Regret is a fat cactus that can absorb reality and keep growing on bare stone. The desert looks empty, but it contains you, everything in and out of your control… all the casualties, causalities, coincidences… it all glides and grinds like a faultline… seeking to be flush with a drunk, weaving horizon… heatwavily melting into a warped but plausible landscape… resting on a treacherous theory-not-theory, "What Could Have Been." Unknowability is flammable material for smoldering imaginations. And so it is that you decide “I DO or DO NOT have something to show for my life” and like cockroaches, memories scatter into the cracks and holes that have appeared between fortified confidences (What’s Known). Fresh foliage grows, accommodating the filled cracks, covering over contradiction like a carpet.
 
Higher concentrations of the evidence of you might be found in the hearts and minds of others, in effort so total it humiliates fear, in a passing impression, ineffable determination, in the gills of a viperfish, or a thoughtfully chosen word, when caring and creativity converge, in the air we breathe, in the person you are when you have to wait, your open-eyed appreciation, reading the room, even in hesitations exposing the courage to sit in conflict. Steam rises; steam is also water, not just the glaciers: Body, Body of Work, Network, Net Worth, Careers, Property, Publications, Awards, Family, and Followers. These comprise a quantifiable portfolio of Worth - a Legacy of things you Built that other people can point at, things people can live next to / in / with / for / through / by. About which people can write yelp reviews or love songs, or start or end wars over. Ice moves and measures like a solid… but many streams feed the river. Unless you decide some things about relative worth, you’re stuck on default, the Value fields came pre-filled, synchronized to something sinister, pushing poisonous population, and you know this. You know this in the arcs of the monuments casting long shadows, but you may fail to apply it to yourself. You certainly know there’s something beneath the bottom line, always emitting a frequency low enough to tune out, a righteous rumble-hum. You can’t live there yet, but don’t forget.
 
You may have spent a lot of years trying to make storms, getting drizzle. You can say that out loud, it’s okay to say, “I call myself a Stormmaker and I have never made it rain.” But from there, you could say, “Drizzle is practically the same thing as a storm,” or you could say, “I was clearly never a Stormmaker and not cut out for it,” or you could say, “Storms are over, maybe never existed, alas my misguided youth,” but however you fill in the blanks, you’ll miss the point, and the cockroaches scatter and settle again, the lines grind and weave, changing the terrain. Well, the desert does need more than a drizzle, storms happen rather often but are harder to make happen, and many streams feed the river.
 
You’ve defragged over some very relevant details. Good you don’t want to just keep going mindlessly, disproportionately amplifying the days when gravity quickens the pour, and momentum itself becomes the motivation. But if you do stop dancing, please don’t do it because in your mind, Time re-organized its line into an arrow pointing either directly at you or directly away. You are not the worst or the best. You're not finished yet and you're not back to square one either. Call yourself whatever you want, the world still needs watering. It was never about you, or even about being not about you. Do you remember why you started dancing in the first place?