encoded notions

Parallel streams of data. Constantly changing. Everything processed all at once. Another moment passes. Repeat.

Our sensations are infinitely parallel. When I wake up in the morning, I can feel the texture of the sheets in a million different places on my skin. The room smells chilly from the filtered air coming from the window air conditioner. I can taste the fact that I am thirsty. All this, and I haven’t even opened my eyes. But if I were to casually recall the day’s events, I wouldn’t relate each and every sensory impulse that happened. For one, I don’t remember every tiny thing that I felt. Secondly, I wouldn’t want to take the time to write it all down. There’s just too much data.

We experience every moment, but only keep the ones that matter the most. Erik Benson writes more about this in his article on paraphrasing the feeling:

Sometimes it is so clear to me that there are two enemies in our imaginations. The secondary one is the tendency to flatten memories and thoughts for storage (the next time you feel like you have to wait until you fully understand what just happened, realize that you already know what happened and you’re just waiting for your mind to forget the inconsistent parts until it only has one dimension).

If your life is water, then memories rapidly freeze into the mould of an ice-cube tray. The liquid fills up each block in turn. Day after day. The memories are static and perfect.

To live life is not to remember it. The memory is not the event.

…we as a human race cannot remember history. We remember snippets, simplifications, and then when it comes time to compare them to current situations we always see current things as infinitely more complicated. It’s the difference between looking at a lake and jumping into it.

It’s a tragic and sad realization that our minds are so incapable of keeping a complicated, inconsistent, multi-faceted object in its original shape for long.

Each collection of sensations, or slice, befriends us once. It lingers and then flees. No matter how many trinkets you collect, pictures you take, or journal entries you write nothing will ever capture that slice completely. In spite of this, everywhere people go you see them trying to grab ahold of the present and pack it into that little ice cube tray and label it a memory. Vacations, graduations, weddings, birthdays, speeches, hikes, sunsets, pets, loved ones, friends, and the self. There is always the omnipresent camera, documenting it all. Watching life trickle away from behind a viewfinder or lens.

I leave for Slovakia on Monday. I may come back at the beginning of August, at least that’s the plan. Hopefully a different or at least a better person in some small and unmeasurable way. I will try to come back with less than I went there with. I plan on trying each moment to get back to the feel part of the cycle. Starting now. Starting right now. Resist the articulation and the simplification and disintegration that inevitably ensues. No pictures, no stories, no lessons, maybe just a t-shirt. Throw away the model, and walk into it. And trip on the first step.

I like Erik’s idea to resist the urge to remember everything, and instead enjoy life as it flows through us. Slice after slice. Repeat.