There was a time when I could remember almost any day, and any conversation. At least those days and conversations that I thought were important for one reason or another. I think those days are no longer with me.
It is not that I can not remember certain days and conversations with perfect clarity. I think maybe my mind reached its capacity for in house storage, or maybe life became too busy for thoughts and such to be floating around all the time. I am not sure which, maybe it is neither.
When time is slow and I think about some event that took place, it still comes back to me, but not always as quickly as it once did. I have also noticed, and it may not be uncommon, those things I remember these days are not the same memories I would choose to remember a decade ago.
I also tend to think more about complete situations rather than just an aspect of a certain moment. I find I remember sounds, smells, or feelings that go with my memory rather than just reliving it again, as I did in the past.
Maybe it is because my life has changed so much that now when I reflect on events from my past, they are seen with how I view life now, rather than how I was when they occurred? At any rate, it is not bad, it is just different.
I also wonder during some of wanderings in my mind what I was thinking at that moment and why. I wonder if I am changing my memory to suit the present me, or I am reliving the event in my minds eye through the me that is now. Although it is also possible, I am picking and choosing filters that allow me to see something from my past the way I would have it now, rather then how I felt about it then.
On our day of judgement it has been said that we are our own judge and jury. Our fate rests in what and how we see what we did with our life and the experiences we had in it. If so that would not be a bad thing for me. Unless I go through change I can not imagine, there is not too much in my life that I would not do over or prefer never happened.
Maybe I am part of the thinking that I am all right, but I am not so sure about you. Or possibly I tend to be easier on myself, knowing that whatever decisions I made at any time in my life were the best decisions I could make at that time.
I had read somewhere that one can pass a polygraph test if enough time goes by and we convince ourselves that whatever we chose to believe is the truth. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth to find that when we pass on all our memories of ourselves were changed over the years into what we preferred them to be, rather than what they really were?
I do not imagine that would happen though, because for that to be possible, it would mean that we are all living a lie through out our lifetime and what would be the point of that…spending a lifetime creating a fantasy that never happened.
How much better it would be to look over our life and pull up a series of memories that were all about the same situation and understand how we handled each situation as we gained life experience. It would be fulfilling I think to be able to say about a situation that when I was a boy, I acted in a certain way, and over time as I understood more about life and my part in it, what I did changed for the better each time.
That is a warming feeling. I am not sure we do that when we daydream about our life, but it would be a pleasant experience. I think starting today I will try to be more conscious of my actions and whether they have changed over time. I hope I have grown.
When I was little, grown ups around me talked about a book. I thought it must have been a pretty good book as many adults were discussing it. Some book about women who took pills. Many of the adults around me took pills too, so in my little world it was not too clear what the difference was between the people in the book and the people around me.
A few years later as I was nearing my teenage years there were the Hippies. I saw Hippies on television. They dressed kind of funny and they smoked a lot. They also seemed to be having a lot of fun and enjoying life. They were not serious and troubled like the adults around me seemed to be.
According to the adults around me they were bad kids who were on their way to big trouble. They were doing drugs. I was not sure what drugs were as they had not made their way into my little world, but being adults they seemed to know. At parties or small friday or have a beer or mixed drink get together at the nearest bar these hippies were discussed over glasses of beer and various concoctions of liquor some of the adults preferred instead of beer.
During my teenage years some of my friends and classmates started experimenting with pills they stole from their parents medicine cabinets. I could not see anything in taking pills for heart trouble, boys taking birth control pills, or what other pills they found in their quest to discover, but the effects were funny and probably fairly serious at the same time. Watching them get sick, they did not look anything like the hippies on television or the drinking adults that were still talking about them.
Somewhere along the line probably from anti smoking campaigns at school led by those few teachers who did not smoke, I learned about addictions. After graduation between late teens and adult hood, I took up smoking and learned about addiction first hand. It is something I would not recommend anyone try out. It goes from new and interesting to something you aren’t happy about, but can’t seem to change, to deciding it’s either quit or eventually die from.
I eventually realized people with addictions were constantly in my life. People with drinking addictions, smoking addictions, even some of the women who talked about the characters in, The Valley Of The Dolls, probably never realized the book was also about them, as they were addicts and did not know it. As I left those things and some of those people, I thought I left addiction behind me.
Over the years as I opened my eyes to what was, and not what I thought there should be I had to come to terms with the idea, that I never left people with addictions somewhere else, in my past. All I had managed to do was distance myself from the addictions that I saw in those around me. I had been living in a rose colored bubble and did not see what really was.
Every day no matter where I go, or what I do there are people who are addicted to something. Shopping addicts, gambling addicts, excitement addicts, food addicts, gun addicts, political addicts, internet addicts, even work addicts to name a few addictions. Whatever we as humans do and most of us enjoy, someone is addicted to it, and it is causing untold problems in their lives.
One of the most frustrating truths of life for me is knowing no one can help any of these people. Unless they reach a point that they are willing to change, they continue feeding their addictions, or jumping from addiction to addiction because that is there personality. Legal gambling is a good microcosm of addiction.
When I play poker, I play with people who are addicts. Some of them hate poker, but think playing poker hides their excessive drinking, or need for excitement craving. Other people who think poker is immoral, yet spend too much of their income on state sponsored gambling, lottery tickets or scratchers. Such is life as we know it.
It took me along time to figure out how to enjoy my life. I used to think that I had to be busy every minute, and every day should be filled with non stop events morning to night. After all that is what all the life style books, and the circuit speakers would talk about, doing what is most important each day.
They were the four windows, pyramids, and there were numerous scales where you could rank your projects, line up you meetings, your day, your life, other peoples lives. I lived in California at the time in the Sierra Nevada mountains. There was only so much to do, and I had a lot of time to read when the money ran out and I was partially homebound.
I read another version about how to live life to its fullest and to get the most out of life explained in a new way. At least if you left off the main purpose of the books and distilled what was left – that is what I came up with.
Except I did not really understand what I was reading…. How could I have a very full day generally doing nothing at all? How was it possible to get up each morning and enjoy one boring day after the next? Some years later I started understanding. I started having little short glimpses of how life is supposed to be.
I think it started with an old worn out man. An old man, and not good for much by a younger man’s standards, and pretty much a waste of space by an average teenager’s view of the world. But he had something I had never seen before. This old man who could not walk twenty feet, enjoyed going outside every day, sliding around on his butt and taking care of his yard!
An old happy man sliding around the grass digging up dandelions and tending flowers, drinking a beer, and not really caring that he could barely walk, I was curious enough to spend some time with him – an hour a week maybe spread across summer afternoons.
He used to tell me about when he was a younger man and able to do more. He said he lived pretty much the same as everyone else. He told me he thought life was okay back then, but nothing to get overly excited about. He said he drank a few beers, smoked cigarettes, and went through the motions of raising a family.
Eventually the kids grew up and started their own lives, his wife eventually took ill and died. His only boy left in town did not spend much time with him, had his own family. He figured that was pretty much the way life went.
Then he told me he became ill himself. He was in the hospital for a while, I am not sure with what, but as he lay in his bed, he started thinking about his life and how special it was even though by everyday standards it was pretty simple and common. Work, eat, sometimes sex with the wife, and sleep. Do it again, play with the kids on Saturday, and go to church on Sunday.
Somewhere in thinking about his routine he said he realized just how special those days were. He told me of those days were special, and every day was special, even if it was spent in a hospital bed. As time went on, I found a few more people like him, men and women both. Usually older, but they all understood just how precious their life was, even if it seemed dull and average looking in. It was the only life they were going to get, and they looked at the world with new eyes each day.
I know some of what they learned rubbed off on me, because eventually I too started to find life more exciting. I could even enjoy going to work most days! My life is what I choose to make of it. Once I decided to enjoy mine, time became short and precious. Now even the simplest things are more enjoyable, although my time is much more precious than I ever thought possible.
I was reading a few blogs the other day, and I thought two posed interesting ideas. The first was prose about Perfect God, the second about brainwashing not being possible (Of course I can not find the blogs now). Later that night, the movie, “Last Temptation Of Christ” came on. I had a little nagging feeling that there was a link between the blogs and the movie, but I could not put them together.
As life works, today I found myself in a discussion about handguns and drugs. The talk was about how much better our worlds would be if handguns could be kept out of the hands of gangsters, and if drugs could be controlled and legalized. What a great idea, but we do not have what it takes to make the world a better place overnight. Maybe in three or four generations we will see those changes but not next week.
One of the people mentioned the bible parable of the seed sower. If you are not familiar with the parable, it goes something like this. A man was planting (sowing) seed by hand. Some fell by the wayside and was eaten by birds. Some seed fell in rocky places where there was not much soil, sprouted and died. Other seed landed where it was supposed to, received everything it need to grow, and grew beyond the norm. At least that is how I remember the parable.
Suddenly I had this flash of insight about the blogs, the movie, and the conversation – a Perfect God, brainwashing, and the sower parable. To me the diction following the parable of the sower parable does not flow with the sower parable. It seems to me as if it were taken from somewhere else and dropped in as an after thought, or a clever deflection lest a truer meaning be found?
Stepping out on a limb, what if the parable is not about the general interpretation people attribute to it? Some people believe it is a veiled admonition to be the grain in the best earth, and develop strong roots, and thrive. That is all the story is about, and there is nothing to understand or decipher, or bring forth from the teaching.
Those who refuse to live a wholesome life are the seeds eaten by birds. Birds are all the things that befall those who do not live a wholesome life. Other people are the seed cast on stony ground, sprouting, growing quickly and dying (literally or not) way too young.
That is the general explanation I have heard since I was a child and that explanation certainly meets the needs of the self righteous. It provides them with everything they need to confirm that they alone are on the right path and doing the right things, and the rest of the world is lost. I thought for many years, that this explanation is all there is the the sower parable. It certainly feeds the ego if nothing else.
What if it is really a literal reflection on life as it is? Some people never have a chance at a good life. Other people start out with the best of everything, but they make a wrong turn, and their life is ruined along the way, drugs, violence, or something else? Only some people – of all the people on earth will become what they were meant to become and reap the fruits of a wholesome life?
That would be where the Perfect God fits in, the parable tells us that is how life is, not that we all are able to become the wheat planted in the best soil! The brainwashing not possible idea would be the thought that the parable is exactly what it states, and nothing more. Perhaps some of us have been blinded (brainwashed) to its true meaning? The movie, and the conversation both talked about the sower parable. William Dafoe stated the parable in a matter of fact manner in the movie, and today we all took the generally accepted version of the parable, seeing gangsters and dug users as the poor seed by their own choice.
These are the things that go through my head when I have too much time to think..about seed planting, and life.
Over the last weeks I have been around a few people with really funny quirks, not that I have any myself. Oddly enough the oddities are all around eating. Because eating is a major part of our existence, it strikes me as kind of funny that well balanced intelligent people have amazing gaps in their thinking.
One of the things about my eating habits is people find it odd I do not eat always eat foods at the proper times. One person told me they could not eat dinner food for any meal other than dinner. They find it odd that I occasionally eat what they consider a dinner food for breakfast, or I eat what most people consider breakfast food at dinner time.
For me, it is a non issue, food is food, and if I have an urge for a roast beef sandwich at breakfast, and a bowl of oatmeal at dinner time, there should be nothing there to raise an eyebrow over. There is the idea of skipping breakfast which was a point of some discussion. In my thinking, for most people skipping breakfast, they are eating too much food the night before. Sleeping very late in the morning also happens from eating too much the night before.
I have found in my experience that if I eat a reasonable amount at night, it is very hard to sleep too late in the morning due to feeling hungry. I am sure there are a few people who just can not eat breakfast, but I do not think they are people who get ready for bed by knocking off three scoops of ice cream preceded by an evening of foraging through the cupboards and refrigerator.
As children we pretty much think whatever our parents and our friends think. We do not have any reason to think any differently. Our world is contained and controlled for the most part. Unless we are exposed to some completely different type of thinking it is doubtful that we have much original thought in us.
As we grow into adults and our world becomes larger, we start to think about ourselves, and our place in the world. We open ourselves up to other possibilities than those that have been given to us by family and friends. We become aware that there is a whole world out there and most of those people out there in the world live much differently than we do, and they seem to get along just fine too.
But then we have these little oddities that somehow we never think about. Back to food again. I can not see myself eating say a beef and kidney pie. I spent three years in England, and never had the urge to try one, even though many people told me they were very tasty and worth trying. Give me a nice slice of roast beef, or a beef steak and I am one happy camper, but no kidney thank you very much. I also eat hot dogs, and occasionally have been observed enjoying a bologna sandwich.
Bad news for me, because beef kidney and beef steak all come from a cow. Hot dogs, and bologna contain most parts of a cow, that I would rather not think about. Waste not want not comes to mind for the making of hot dogs and bologna. Most prepared foods are also proud that their meat is 100% beef, they just do not lay any claim to specific parts of beef, or chicken for that matter.
This is where our thinking goes off on a tangent, not only about food but other parts of life too. All those people in the world we wish would disappear live in the only world there is, just like us. We can pretend we don’t eat soft meats, but we know we probably do. We just don’t see them in their natural state.
So it is with people in our world. Some of us dislike certain groups of people for hundreds of reasons. We may not have any real sound reasoning around out thinking, and we overlook it. We need those people to make our world complete, and they need us for the same reason. It’s all beef when we look a little closer.
I went to an organized church function on Saturday. It was disconcerting attending a function that they has changed little over the years. I imagine it is the same with all organized religious services, but maybe not, as I have not experienced that many different religious services. This particular one was only different in the level of the priest(s) conducting the event.
They spent many minutes telling us – the audience – how great they were, and what they had been doing the last month or so. One of the two shared that he had been in the Pope’s presence earlier in the week celebrating a mass. While it is all good and wonderful that they were having such wonderful things happening in their lives, I thought the news could have been saved for a different time. For some of the people attending the event, I am sure the only vacations they have ever enjoyed were the summer break of their school years when they were too young to work.
The bragging portion of the event finished reminding everyone that the event was not a formal service and they were not excused from their obligation of attending service on Sunday, such as they are directed by the Church. I found it interesting that they did not feel the same restraint when it came to passing the hat for collecting money during the initiation. It also was not a substitute for the Sunday collection. As the basket came by me, I wondered, if I were a member of the church, would the leaders be hurt if I just donated an amount twice as large today and skipped showing up tomorrow? It always seemed that money is the main point of some church services.
The people for whom the service was being held ranged in age from teenagers to gray haired adults. While these people were being celebrated, they were also being admonished. They were reminded many of the do nots that every parent tries to ingrain into their children as they grow up. I thought the chastising was a little late in time, not to mention the months worth of classes they went through to get to that point.
The high point for me was listening to a three year old girl talking to her best friend a few seats away. She had a lot more important ideas to share than the droning coming over the speaker system. She informed her friend that when she was a baby she lived inside her mother’s body. Now that she is not a baby any longer she lives with her mother but not by choice. That in itself I thought was quite a revelation for a three year old, but there was more important information she needed to share still coming.
The little girl prattled on as an self proclaimed expert in many subjects that most three year olds have little awareness of. At one point she notified her friend that she lived with her mother for reasons other than she was birthed by her. She told her friend that she was born by her mother because that was the only way she could be with her sister who arrived before her. She loved her sister and did not like being separated. She then said that if it was not for her sister she did not know if she would have been born by her mother. I am sure that comment made Mom feel a little dejected.
For my part I suppose I did not add much to the service, as I spent the better part of an hour with one ear listing to the droning, and a more attentive ear listening to a three year old talk about love, and life both here and before. I thought it was a sad state for the celebration, or perhaps a sad state for myself when a three year old captured my attention over the service. I doubt my absence was noticed by anyone as they were trying hard to pretend the droning litany was a new revelation which they never contemplated before.
I always find young children’s thoughts fascinating. They talk about things when asked the right questions with such authority that sometimes I wonder how little water they drank at the river Plato wrote about. Of course just like the rest of us, a few years later if they were to be asked the same questions they would look up with a clueless expression and say they don’t know anything about that.
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