Day 21

I went for a very long walk today. Started from home (near the barn market at Mckenzie and Blenkinsop), walked up to campus, then up Mt. Tolmie, then around Cedar Hill golf course, then back home after a rest at the duck pond. There were many ducks.

A few words tonight about memory: Repetition doesn't bode well for memory; that is, I find though introspection that I have almost no memory of things I did for years. My nearly 3-year stint at Denny's part time (probably 1000 hours all told) has 'condensed' into very few tangible memories.
Entire relationships of mine are little more than a few stories and moments now. Things I did a hundred times I can only really remember doing once, if that makes sense at all...

The interesting thing about memory is that it informs much of what we decide to do in the present. I believe that if a person has memories of only a small 'world', that person will see fewer options in life, as well as raise the level of importance attached to what we normally consider unimportant things. A homebody, for example, finds things within the home extremely important, while a socialite likely finds those same things much less important. A person addicted to a computer game is reduced to anguish when hours of labour are squandered with his/her character's death, whereas a career/family man will see such things as trivialities, at most.

I guess the conclusion is that priorities, when viewed subjectively, are always on a scale. Perhaps the same might be said for suffering, or happiness.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 58

I do fear, sometimes, that the act of pondering aloud has become a cathartic experience and nothing more . It is hard in this town to find a diversity of thought, because we've all been raised in very similar ways with the same norms, experiences, and conventions. I find that the mightiest opinions of some of the the twentysomethings I know are so damningly narrow that they cannot possibly stand to the slightest breeze of doubt. Often the biggest theory is the thinnest. Our shadows grow long and starved moments before they disappear under the sunset. The natural world has cursed us with its indifference, its vaccuum of conscience in which deeds neither good nor evil subsist. I find the urge to view our species of conscious and conscientious beings as alien. It is as though the world we inhabit was never intended for us to inhabit it. In short, this town is a box. This country, political system, individualistic ideology, humanist dogma, faux rebellion against imagined authority; it ...
Read more

Day 212

It is very true that the best people in the world at any discipline, skill, sport, instrument (etc). are never particularly well-rounded people. There should be, as my grandma mentioned over dinner last night, a competition for "well-roundedness" with international competitors. In order to win you'd have to be physically capable, perhaps musical and mathematical, moral and charitable, very learned, and so forth. And that's the interesting thing, the jacks of all trades get absolutely no attention from the peanut gallery. But on the contrary, they typically have the healthiest and happiest and most fulfilling of lives. I can't tell you how many young pianists I've met, for whom piano was the sole self-measure of pride and value. And, like all people who have themselves judged for one thing, they are utterly miserable, feeling highs and lows that appear and fade as quickly as do the passing opinions of strangers. --- On a tangent: some of the most miserable girl...
Read more

Day 168

You hear non-religious people say it all the time: "If only there was a God! That would honestly be great, if there was a supreme moral arbier in the universe looking out for my every action and running the universe with me in mind. It's really too bad there isn't." I used to say that, until I came across a few authors who vehemently claim that such a wish is, in reality, a wish for slavery. When we ask for the comfort of a god (or fantasize for it anyway) were asking for a kind of absolution that only the slave can have. And the price for that is extremely high. And still, there times when I do wish I were this sort of slave, though I no longer say so with a smile.
Read more