One of the worst feelings has to be missing a concert of a band you like a lot. Fundamentally it’s an issue of “missing out”. This year I missed being able to see Murder By Death (Perhaps the greatest band ever), and Thursday (lyrically sublime).
What a contrast to the previous year when I posted a long while ago about my experience meeting Geoff Rickly. I got to see Thursday twice and Murder by Death twice in a year. I was also super fortunate to meet Adam Turla and Sarah Balliet. I told them to come to California more often and they did. They came to my backyard and due to circumstances was unable to.
Year after year we become shadows of our former selves. One year I go to many concerts, the next I don’t. As Max Cohen (in Pi) would say,
…Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics;the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile…
One clear example is with physical training. There are years when I’m firing on all cylinders, and then years when I’m not. Of course this is scalable to smaller units of time like days, weeks, and months. I’ve tried to analyze why sometimes my training itself falls totally off for extended periods. I think it might just be as natural as the wax and wane of caribou. I think there has to be a balance between not fighting what your body might be telling you and determining whether or not it’s laziness or that you just need to wane your caribou supply.
That’s a deeper question that will vary from person to person. You read about the greats like Marvin Eder, John Grimek, Saxon, Sandow, the list is infinite, and you wonder if they ever got the lazy bug. I know a lot of it is retrospective glorfication, they must have since they were human afterall.
The feeling of say being able to only do 5-6 pullups when I was able to knock out sets of 15 is a combination of frustrating and discouraging. I suppose though that this is an issue of perspective since the mindset should be, “look at what I was capable of, this shows how much more room you can make up. It’ll be a challenge, but you’ve done it before.”
In short, the feeling of “missing out” is perspective. Change it. Also in the immortal words of Mark Twain:
Don’t cry over spilled milk. It could have been Whiskey.
Speaking of which. Don’t Cry Over Spilled Milk Day just passed.
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