Sep 23, 2006 01:08
The evenings are getting cold here again, and the changing weather has intersected with recent events to remind me of the unlikely scenarios that brought me to this town last year. I am often fond of preaching stunning words of wisdom to anyone who happens to fall within earshot, but in an ironic twist, it usually takes months or years of repeating the same tidbit of knowledge before it finally sinks through my skull in the way its supposed to. Maybe that explains the vocal repetition.
Being a fairly introspective person at times, I try to maintain a working study of my failures in life. It has been my experience that when a person starts to do this, two things begin to happen. The first is the patterns appear. Not patterns like advanced statistical analysis, but embarrassing, obvious exercises in poor decision making that repeat themselves over and over again, in seemingly perfect coincidence with the undesired results that cause unhappiness. The second thing that eventually takes place upon constant review of the facts is sudden understanding. Every failure a person feels stays with them until they are able to gain something important from the experience that outweighs the negativity, which happens only when they personally metabolize the lesson to be learned. Sometimes this happens quickly and sometimes this never happens, depending on how caught up people are in their own issues. I've gotten better with practice, but sometimes I still stop and can't believe that I just repeated the same failing actions, and was once again surprised when I failed. I probably come from a long, distinguished line of philosophical knuckleheads.
I was already in a weird mood about the weather today, and then I went to the video store with my roommate. The chill of the breeze, the smoke in the air, and the dependable smell of the video store at night sent me on another time warp, this time years back to the old store, and bike rides home to an even older house. All of that seems like out of body memories through the eyes of a past life now. I feel like I've died and been born a dozen times since I lived in that room, but I still have flashbacks whenever I smell that type of hardwood, certain hair products, or perfume.
The book I'm reading now is about sensory interaction between the animate world around us, and how we've lost our connection to it. Abram argues that absolutely everything in the world is subjectively experiencing the rest of the world in its own specific way, from rocks, to wind, to frogs, to humans. At any moment where these subjective existences intersect though any of the five senses, there is an INTERACTION between the existences which moves both ways. This is betrayed by even our casual speech, in which rivers babble, thunder threatens, squirrels scold, and smells whisper to us about old jobs and nights outside eating hot pizza in the cold, watching the cars drive by.
On the way home I talked to my roommate about it, and said that the most disembodied part was remembering mentalities and viewpoints that aren't mine today. When we got home we watched a movie about a bunch of comfortable white kids who go out at night and beat each other bloody for excitement, pride, and a sense of belonging in a shitty world. More old memories from a different time when I was a different person.
Most of the time I don't miss my past lives for a second, and even when they call to me, I pretend not to hear them, like some old acquaintance that spotted me in a crowd. We don't have much in common these days. Every once in a while, though, they hit me like a grenade, and then I stand there stunned, thinking, "How fast time flies."