oh dear. sorry for that. but it's been stuck in my head for some unknowable reason, and i thought i'd share that little earworm with all my readers - both of you. in reality, i do know why it's stuck in my head, and it's a long and winding road that takes to here from where i began. so i shall spare you the trip and simply go back to the start, which is the germane point anyway. a whole new world...or is it?
i opened the door to this a crack with my last post. i'm not at all sold on the idea that we have but one dance in this existence. i know, i know - i'm a methodist christian, and that faith (indeed, pretty much any christian denomination) leaves essentially no room for interpretation on this subject. regardless of whether one prefers to take everything paul wrote as truth or with a grain of salt of biblical proportions (see how i did that? i tied it back into itself! ha.), or if one even wants simply to pare it down to accept only the words of jesus himself, there's nowhere to go with that line of thought. once, and that is it. unless you're unitarian universalist, but they only sort of count as christian by virtue of growing out of a christian denomination in the first place. anyway...
i'm finding that i don't much care what the history of my faith says, which seems on one level to negate it as my faith, i suppose. that's been coming for much of my life, though, so please do forgive me if i'm not exactly wearing a hairshirt and sackcloth over it. i'm not rescinding my membership in that club, but likewise i am not seemingly on board with all the bylaws. in any case, i have developed a nasty habit (to hear some tell it) of cherry-picking what sounds right to me and what does not. i am comforted by the notion that i am not simply choosing the easy rules, but just passing on the ones that make little sense in light of what we know of history at this point and that are at complete odds with faith systems that were around for millennia before abram became abraham. i do not claim to be right, but only claim that i do not know, and any who might write me hate mail for this paragraph will be wasting the parenthetical gap between the health of your wrists and carpal tunnel syndrome, for i have no intention whatsoever of engaging you in debate.
so, back to it. recent events have opened me up to some...impressions that i may have had for a long time but was never in the right place to ponder. something about being in a psych ward leaves one with a number of philosophical conundra. perhaps it's all the extra time one has while hiding and praying that the more dramatic expressions of mental disease aren't communicable. regardless, a lot of introspection has been going on, only some of which has been shared here, and it has brought about the concept of the 'familiar' to me.
i have dipped my toe into this already, but the 'familiar' has become kind of my name for those people with whom i am immediately comfortable. 'soulmate', the word i originally used, seemed both too strong and limiting at the same time, for while it connotes a depth that may go beyond that about which i am speaking, it likewise has a colloquial meaning that would presuppose a singular pairing, and the familiars number more than one. and so i have been trying to make some sense of this fact that there are people who to me simply seem immediately non-threatening and my impressions of whom are instantly exempt from my own mind's fears. how does this happen? why are these people, with whom in many cases i have no reason whatever to be comfortable, so quickly trusted? is there a single common trait that they all share, something that i can recognize in them and by it know that they are not like anyone else?
and it struck me while i was in my bed one night in the ward, and it struck me again a day or two after i was out, and i ignored the thing until i was talking to one of them and it struck me again: perhaps the word 'recognize' is what it's all about. i don't mean to imply that there is necessarily any such thing as my coming to know that once upon a time this one was my wife, or that one was my best friend, and that one day with enough work and regression therapy we might realize that we have known each other as joey, susan, theodorus and grok. but if we do cycle back through here, what are the chances that we retain no impressions of our past experience? i do not speak of memory, per se, but of retained experience on some level that cannot be accessed by our consciousness while informing our new experiences.
i was reading a brief article on the recent death of the most studied man in the history of memory science. he had had an operation at a young age to remove a segment of his brain, and with that segment went his ability to consciously remember anything long-term. he could remember things for approximately 20 seconds, until it was time for that information to move into long-term memory and then it was gone. at one point he was subjected to a series of repetitive manual tasks, and each time it seemed to him to be a new task. but he slowly grew more adept at the task with repetition - his muscle memory was still working even though he had no idea that it was. he remembered nothing, but his body built that memory for his conscious mind. that is a solid analogy for what i am trying to get across. that though we are never consciously aware that we have shared our lives with someone before, that there is some metaphysical analog to muscle memory that is seated in the soul and allows us to 'recognize' those in whom we have placed our trust in the distant past.
i also do not mean to imply that we are stuck recycling the same friends over and over again. this is a big ol' world, and once one adds time into the equation perhaps things don't line up terribly well. we also must allow for the fact that we develop new friends. i have, i know this to be true. but these friends may be the ones that have taken me time to trust, and in that time has been built a friendship that may well transcend this life and wander off into another when we bump into each other again.
i am coming to think that possibly we all have this ability, that it is just part of the human experience, but that i am sensitive to it because it is so hard for me to trust anyone that those with whom i quickly feel safe stand out in the starkest of relief.
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