From the Vault, Part II

Was looking through what I thought was a pile of blank journals I have (there are quite a few, it's a bit of a thing with me), trying to find one suited to pasting some images of my dissolvable garment in it. Turns out quite a few of them have stuff written in it, stuff I've forgotten about. A lot of it, like the word document I blogged about a few weeks ago, is about death and consciousness. I find it interesting that:

a) these issues have been occupying my mind for such a long time...
b) that I'd forgotten about these things that I'd written.

It reminds me of the fact that one day, someone will be going through my things when I die, wondering what to do with them, why certain things were kept and held on to and treasured, getting what they might consider insights to someone they thought they knew as they sort though an assemblage of objects that made up my life and as they read these strange thoughts I have tried to marshal on paper.

I know that it is ME that has written these things... but not quite me, somehow, as I have forgotten about them. I am revisiting myself - with who I was at a certain moment in time. Parts of me are coming alive again. I'd like to think that this is what happens when someone looks at my things when I am gone.

Too much and not enough

Had one of those my God I’m alive moments before while I was doing the dishes. You know the feeling – suddenly struck by your own being and consciousness and it's almost too much to bear.

I was suddenly so aware of the warm water, the bubbles sliding over my hands and the feeling of my skin beginning to pucker and wrinkle from prolonged submersion. Strange evening light shining though the window and everything wonderful and too much, overwhelming and you want that bittersweet pang to stop but never to end at the same time.

When the moment had passed (as these moments inevitably do), I began to wonder what, if anything, had triggered it. Was it the strange quality to the light outside? The music playing in the background? Both of those things, or perhaps none?

I wonder now, as I’m writing this, if these moments are so fleeting because we can’t handle them. Some kind of self-preservation thing, perhaps? Maybe our brains cannot cope with being aware of ourselves for too long, somehow hyperconscious, so it shuts down, turns away, and we start to think instead about what’s for dinner. The moment is forgotten, and we are somehow less alive than we were in that moment – just going though the motions of living instead.