Where Have I Been All My Life?

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Writer: Sam Costello
Artist: Benjamin AE Filby

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There’s a lyric in the Townes Van Zandt song “To Live Is to Fly” that I try to live by: “It don’t pay to think too much on the things you leave behind.” I try to live by it, because it seems like the right way to live, but I almost always fail. I think about the things I’ve left behind, the things in my past, all the time. I go over old decisions and actions, reassessing them in the light of my current life. That reassessment leads to a lot of second guessing. But what’s the point of second guessing decisions that are, in some cases, a decade or more old and can’t be changed? It seems to me second guessing is a habit that undercuts and nullifies the present. There’s no end to possible second guessing, no end to the topics to torture apart into minute pieces. The temptation to obsess on the past, and the effect it has on the present, is what led me to write “Where Have I Been All My Life?”