Late last night I dove deeper into the Deck of Captured Moments activity from the Just Because Club book. To read more about it, begin a few posts back and work your way back to the present entry.
I notice an enhanced awareness of each of the senses in my experiences throughout the day. Since last night, I added a scent detail, now I have noticed the scents around me as I go about my day.
Tonight, I smelled peanut butter, bananas, chlorine steam in the bathtub, salt in the foggy air, fish cooking in the house, and more.
As I went through the memory cards, I noticed that I did not recall the scent associated with about a quarter of the recalled moments. Up until this exercise, I could recall the other sensory details with ease.
Earlier today, the insight dawned upon my brain that memory has no place in the present. I looked up the word ‘hark’ in the Oxford Dictionary, and it read,
hark |härk|
verb [ intrans. ] poetic/literary
listen : Hark! He knocks.
PHRASAL VERBS
hark back: mention or remember something from the past : if it was such a rotten vacation, why hark back to it? [ORIGIN: originally a hunting term, used of hounds retracing their steps to find a lost scent.]
hark back to evoke (an older style or genre) : paintings that hark back to Constable and Turner.
ORIGIN Middle English : of Germanic origin; related to German horchen, also to hearken.
Check out the question: “If it was such a rotten vacation, why hark back to it?”
Upon reading this, I noticed in my flesh the absence of the past in my present experience. Just a body sitting here, sometimes recalling notions and ideas and phantoms of the past, but none of them have any place in the current moment, no more than any other story. Unless, of course, some strange consciousness experiment asks me to dredge them up and play around with them.
Now I ask you this:
Next time you hear someone complaining about or regretting the past, ask them this question:
“If it was such a rotten vacation, why hark back to it?”
Credit: GTD Times
See y’all tomorrow.
-GTD
Wanderer, traveler, lover, warrior, yogi, massage therapist, trainer, visionary, creator, writer, seeker, admirer of consciousness.
Tags: consciousness, experiment, GTD, hark, Just Because Club, memory, moment, moments, odor, scent
November 20th, 2008 at 9:58 am
The Past
Each life is a work of art, but not a static one. It is a multi-dimensional painting or a fluid sculpture; or perhaps a story in a book whose twists and turns of plot may change at any moment, being rewritten even as the reader turns the page. No one brush stroke controls the placement of another brush stroke. No sentence mandates another sentence on the page. Nonetheless, once a mark has been made on the page, it does suggest a certain placement and direction for the next, and the next after that, and so on. The masterpiece is complete from the moment of birth, yet ever changing and evolving. Past events are brush strokes on the canvas, pages in the book – they are part of the work. The past is the context through which we interpret the present. It cannot be otherwise, for the synapses of our minds are shaped by those events.
–Sandra B