Free Flow
Do you have these random thoughts?
Just spitting some free-flowing thoughts out into the world…
So…thoughts. We all have them, but do you ever have ‘random’ memories of specific locations pop into your head?
Dull as Dishwater
Today whilst doing the dishes I had a sense of a specific corner of a specific building, on a specific street in Newcastle City Centre.
Thanks to the incomprehensible madness known as Google Photos, I can (kinda) show you the contents of my head this very morning.
Location Location
Is this really a memory of a location?
What’s the colour of your front door?
Mine is a grey-blue colour, and when I picture it, there isn’t an emotional element because my brain is just giving me an amalgamation of the countless times I’ve seen and interacted with the said door.
Now if the memory had emotional content…say, I remember a time when I was locked out and crying with my head on the door… this would be a memory of a specific time in my life and the door, in all it’s bluey-greyness, would be an anchor to that moment.
So, do these random inconsequential memories have emotional content?
Yes and No.
There’s an emotion that makes me feel like this is a stand-out moment in time…but I think it’s quite separate from any emotion that I was experiencing at the time.
Doing the dishes there’s an emotion that feels sanguine…beautiful even…but it’s a very ‘ordinary’ beauty. It feels detached and yet clearly directed by the moment of myself as a young (clueless) man making my way in the world.
This is where my post is going to get weird (if it isn’t weird enough already) because I’m not sure where or what these moments are about. Also, we’re talking about time, and let’s just fess up, no one actually knows what time is.
“Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present.” — Abhijit Naskar, the author of "Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
"People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." — Einstein
So, it’s our brains that say, ‘This thing happened back then’ and ‘This thing is happening now’ and that other thing ‘is going to happen soon’, when the reality, as best anyone can make of it, is that everything is simply happening.
So, depending on where I position my conscious awareness, I’m 46yrs old me doing the dishes, or a 20-something-year-old me walking the streets of Newcastle.
Random or No?
Seemingly random, these memories occur fairly frequently usually when I’m doing some low-level skill like washing up.
Never the same location or the same period in my life.
Spanning the entire period of my adulthood, the memories seem completely random, but they do have one thing in common.
Nothing even remotely noteworthy has ever happened to me at the location in question. I didn’t bump into an old friend. I wasn’t robbed at knifepoint. I didn’t so much as stub my toe.
If my rational mind is to be believed, there’s just no reason it should be a conscious memory at all.
Imagine telling a friend that you keep recalling images from your favourite film Titanic, but not the big dramatic scenes where people are cast adrift into icy seas, but a random image of a patch of carpet or the angle of a door handle. Your friend would probably be making arrangements to have you checked up on.
*Full disclosure, I’ve never seen Titanic. I hear good things.
You Feeling Me?
Very much a ‘feeling’ person, the ‘images’ in my dreams and memories are less visual and more a felt sense of what I’m seeing, and where I’m at emotionally. It’s all very dream-like, and when I come back to myself, I’m left wondering what the heck that was all about.
“Well I don’t know what that’s about but it feels like a pleasant connect to the arc of my life” —David Venus; doing the dishes
The images, if I can call them that, are clear enough that I can always pinpoint and consciously recognise the location but that’s as concrete as it gets.
And it’s not that I’m ‘in’ the memory as such, it’s more that I’m just a feature of that memory.
It all starts to sound a little odd now that I’m writing it down.
Just like your front door is an amalgamation of the many times you’ve looked at it, it would seem my life is the same.
How many ways can we look at our front door…how many different viewpoints…how many ways can we appreciate ourselves?
When I look back as a middle-aged dad I can see the child-like nature in my 20yr old Newcastle self.
My 20yr old Newcastle self sees himself as rugged and fierce.
My teenage angst self sees my 20yr old self with pride and admiration
With enough reference points, we start to see the individual less and the humaness more. I see the spring in the step, a lot of twenty-yr-olds have as they shake off formal education and see what the world really has to offer them.
Synesthesia
Ancient Greek σύν syn, 'together', and αἴσθησις aisthēsis, 'sensation'.
I’m wondering if it’s some kind of Synesthesia; experiencing things through various processes all at once.
Synesthesia was first reported by philosopher John Locke, who, in 1690, wrote about a blind man who said he experienced the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet
More recent research has reported a man who said the word basketball tastes like waffles
Kinesthetic synesthesia
Colours and sounds are easier to research than feelings so I guess this is why we know much less about Kinesthetic synesthesia.
Rather than individual numbers or letters linked to colours, sounds or tastes, complex systems of relationships are linked together.
I don’t know if this phenomenon is what I’m experiencing but I do know that my sense of self is very much located in the feeling body.
It’s why I’m so natural at bodywork.
If I were to give it some rational analysis id think that only now as a 40 something yr old parent do I have the overall context of that 20yr old me lolloping those city streets.
Just Me?
So, does anyone else get those flashes of memory of these sort of ‘non-events’.
They are so boring as memories…one time I recalled making a right turn off a roundabout. You know those large English roundabouts with flowerbeds planted in the centre?
Ultimately, I’m left with the feeling of, “Well I don’t know what that’s about but it feels like a pleasant connect to the arc of my life”
I’m also left wondering if, these actually are the significant moments of my life?
If this is the case, life is less about making moments (those extraordinary ones we’re oh so quick to share, on Instagram), and more about how much we can broaden and deepen the relationship to one's moments (all of them!).
Yours in curiosity and good health,
Manos
Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward. Religion is what you do with these moments of over-mastery in your life, these rare times in which you are utterly innocent. —My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
by Christian Wiman