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« Three Parts Giving up, One Part Hope... | Main | Grateful Five »
My Brain
May 20, 2007
I have started to appreciate the spirit of gardening. It's such a creative and also time-consuming and labor-intensive practice. It seems to involve a great deal of forethought and artistry, but also there is this element of chance. It's one of those things that I find myself thinking "I wish I had time for that." And then considering that if I really wanted to make time for it, I probably really could. And then I start to think that I would rather appreciate the artistry of my neighbors than take it on for myself at this point in my life.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my brain. I can't tell if my thoughts about my thought-processes were what inspired a number of discussions on that topic this week, of if my week-long discussion of my thought processes has inspired me to think about it further. Either way, I am questioning a very basic way of viewing and processing the world that I have used for quite some time now, pretty much unconsciously. That is...I tend to narrate my way through life.
At the risk of sounding like a total nut, I am going to describe my history of this. hahaha.
When I was little, I did it with dolls and stuffed animals, and the disconnected imagining of what I called "scenarios." I remember when I was in high school, I managed to confess this constructed world of mine to a friend, and she agreed that she did the same thing. So I know I am not completely alone in this.
Later, this constructed world seemed to be replaced by a need to reinterpret my real world. Almost constantly. In my writing, I was always recording my emotional response to what I was experiencing around me. My journals from this time in my life are all weird disjointed sentence structures with words that sounded vaguely pretty together. It was very much a poetic picture of my emotional landscape. Meanwhile, the narrative began in zines and other forms of communication. Letter-writing. It seemed as if everyone I knew, myself included, had to spend a lot of time narrating and explaining their surroundings because we were all so geographically isolated.
And I kept communicating this way for years. Mentally writing notes about how I was going to describe my experiences in words once the experience was over. Because I am generally a fairly solitary person, but also because those who I was closest to emotionally were generally far away in proximity and could not share the actual experience with me. The retelling of the experience became part of the experience itself.
And I guess that is what I do today. I find myself searching for words to describe all of my senses in any given situation. It's not always something I am conscious of, but I am sure to an outside observer, it seems to be indicative of a disconnection from the experience when, in fact, it is my way of connecting TO the experience...and connecting others to the experience, as well.
I am not sure if any of this is making sense to anyone. I guess what jarred me about the week-long conversation I had on this topic is I was accused of being somehow phony because I find it necessary to expound on things that make me happy, and the feeling of happiness and gratitude that regularly comes rushing up through me even at the most depressing moments in my life. I think for this person, it is such an alien concept to find joy in sorrow that it seems to him that I am denying sorrow and manufacturing joy. I really don't think that is so. Just as I don't think it's ingenuine to feel nothing but sadness, I just don't feel that it's fake or shallow to seek contentment - even in the smallest doses - and focus on it until it expands exponentially.
I have more to say about this, but I think I will save it for later.
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