Six of Cups

The Six of Cups brings us up to the present day, where, ready or not, all of the past is completed, and completed prologue. The core meaning is This Moment Now, one of appreciation and deep reflection on what has brought us here. We are cumulative beings, a culmination of prior influences. Now we are in a moment well-earned, where nothing more needs be done for a while. Humanly good and decent days are portrayed here. The terms and conditions for our happiness are satisfied. There is well-being and feeling well. Or this is a memory of such a moment, brought forward into the present. It’s good to look back and review, as long as we aren’t desperate to be where we’re not. Kierkegaard said that “life can only be understood backwards, although it must be lived forwards.” This is a time for that understanding. The Yijing counterpart, Gua 63, Already Across, speaks of a present which is now just about perfect, where all of the parts have found their proper place and it’s time for some final or finishing touches, and tying off of loose ends. This is the culmination of a long project or past, but time neither stops nor slows down, and any relative perma- nence to this pleasant tableau might as well be forgotten. Incompleteness is what drives us, and calls in the energy needed. So with the dynamic just about spent, it’s time to prepare to do maintenance, against no less of a foe than the heat death of the universe. There are diminishing returns here. Seeing forward is facing decay. Even temporary permanence will only be won by an anticlimactic, uphill fight against unrelenting entropy. Still, our duty is to enjoy things while they last, and if we can be wise, to be grateful even as our favorite things are slipping away. It is fashionable among the ‘spiritual’ folk to advise living this life in the present, but there is a point to having our memories, as well as our predictions. We can’t really be here now for long, and it takes a bit of conceit to think we can be here now at all. At the very least we can add some breadth and depth to even our shortest moments. We bring the inertia of our pasts to all of our perceptions. This is called apperception, our wealth of experience brought to bear on the present, together with our cognitive errors and Bly’s ‘long bag we drag behind us.’ Consciousness of the past informs our present emotional situations, and affect has inertia aplenty. We face our current problems with the way we remember our pasts. It helps to have some awareness of what we are doing. If we want to move forward, we won’t be over-idealizing the past or longing to recreate it. We still want life to keep getting better than what we’ve had before. Vonnegut wrote “And I asked myself about the present. How wide it was, how deep it was. And how much was mine to keep.” In a way, we live to collect good recollect- ions, stockpiling emotional snapshots, special moments to take along with us through time, even though most memories are destined to fade or get misremembered. We try to freeze them for later use, especially the flashes of perfection. It’s the job of storyteller and poet to turn the world into memories, and those back into tales. The goddess of Memory was the mother of the Muses. Goethe’s Faust both risks and does it all for a single moment of happiness worth freezing in time. We can often count the best of our moments, and the ones that are close to perfection are usually not all that numerous. We keep these in special places in ourselves. We can keep our lost loved ones alive in this way as well. There is much to be praised in bringing the past along. There are problems when we measure our current moments against our most-shining ones, and when we think the person at the center of those is the only one who we truly are. And there are problems in being so fond of ‘back there’ that we cannot face today. But we need to bring the things that we’ve learned along with us if we want any worthwhile kind of tomorrow. And good memories show they are worth making more of, even for older folks. The past is not really finished or perfect. The degree of our memory informs our present awareness and actions. We use what we learn and bring with us in order to better ourselves. The past brought to present helps to choose better futures, and we have all our various pasts to choose from. But even memories can keep on growing. The neural structures of memory are plastic. Each time we bring something up, we add the present to it. If we bring a thing up as resentment, we make our bad feelings just a little bit worse before we put them back. If we bring a thing up in an atmosphere of fondness, kindness, understanding, or forgiveness, we can file it back away with a little less of an unpleasant charge. There is no rule that forbids our rewriting of personal history, in non-delusional ways, updating ourselves, upgrading ourselves in the process.