The Reflectors of life

There is this strange resemblance between created reality and real life. (By 'Created reality' here, I mean any form of make believe story telling – a simple story narration, a comic book or lets go for a better example – Film shooting. If you are present at the location of a shoot then no amount of post production can change your perception of how the actual location looked like and the number of wires and Reflectors s kept haphazardly here and there. If you have experienced it first hand the set will remain a set for you and even though you will be seeing the most beautiful take aptly edited on the screen, the memory of numerous other wrong takes will dominate your mind. Enjoying the final scene becomes a difficult task after that. Its difficult to cut away from the memories and let go of them to enjoy the final cut. Personally, I simply love the procedure of making something because the end product – well... we all know it is a mere amalgamation of everything that was worth making it to the cut.

Likewise, real life memories also operate on more or less the same rule. An incident from your life (narrated in any form) will look like a final cut on the screen to me and it will be enjoyable as if its a fictional account of your past, on the other hand you while narrating it are actually hitting a refresh button in your memory and seeing that scene again – with all its wires and Reflectors s. Enjoyable for you or not? That I'll leave up to the genre of your memory – but for me it definitely was. Why? Because not only I was unaware of 'the Reflectors s' of your life – additional surroundings, your emotional/physical/at times financial state at that specific point in time but being not present at the 'moment' also makes me look at your memory at a macro level and enjoy the final cut of your story. Guess thats what makes a memoir fun to read, as a school boy, I remember reading Dale Carnegie's struggle and used to wonder how awesome his journey would've been – traveling in carriage trains, working in farms, going to a big city with big dreams and spending years of rejection before making it big. Yes it all sounds interesting because we will never be able to see the Reflectors s that were around him while he was going thru this classical hero's journey. That remains with the person who experienced it first hand.

At times when things are simply out of control and world starts looking like a gloomy stage do we try to cut-off these additional Reflectors s and those clumsy wires on the floor, those bad takes, those silly bloopers, just to come out of the set and start looking at the final cut? Because final cuts always show – Its not the failure but the final product that counts and in the end, everything falls in place.