There have been times when I scratched the thing I loved most by myself, just to face the craziness head on.
I completely sympathize with that feeling: You get a new thing – something which embodies whatever ideals you long for at the moment: sleekness, speed, utility, freedom from the doldrums of life – and reality jumps up and smacks your ideal right across the face, leaving a mark that can’t be fixed, that stares you in the face, mockingly, with eyes of fire every time you look at it. It makes you want to throw the thing away and start over.
In a way, we taste a little bit of death in these moments: the death of some fleeting thing that we thought we had, for a moment, captured in our new vehicle, or TV, or computer. For one brief instant, we’d reached into the world of perfect forms, and come away with a vision of beauty so wondrous, so smooth…
It’s funny that we, creatures of an impermanent and ever-changing world, find such joy in these moments. Almost as if we weren’t born for this, and all these terrible experiences and sudden depressions were specifically intended to hone our appreciation for such things, while at the same time learning to let them free.