(Note: Almost didn't post this as it was way too short to explain the demented thinking behind the hypothesis and is muddled, but I thought that in itself is how I feel about my life, so why not. I have always been a combination of pseudo-intellectual and muddled thinker, so if yer up to it, try to make sense outa it and let me know what I wrote. TY).
It’s funny, how the mind will illuminate something from the past and bring it to the forefront as if only yesterday, instead of yesteryear. You go along day-to-day, one day blending into another, more moving through life than living it. You seem to live your life vicariously through memory rather than dynamically through each days events at the time these events transpire.
As the days pass, life happens: you leave school, get a job, fall in love, get married, have kids, have grandkids, even have great grandkids; you get a job, quit that job and get another, and another, and another, finally settling into a career; your health is taken for granted—until it fails and the doctors and pharmaceuticals bring you back to close-to-normal, then it fails again, a cycle with shorter and shorter interludes of hale-and-hearty times, with each period of feeling good just a little less than the one before. Eventually you realize that things have turned topsy-turvy and that now both the body and the psyche have mostly down days and the good days are the ones noticed as they become rarer and of shorter duration.
You raised the kids for a couple of decades, bitching about what a hassle it is, all the while loving them with all your heart, but somewhat hopefully anticipating the day they begin their own life and move into their own house and out of yours. It is a combination of selflessness and selfishness: you want to see them stand on their own two feet, nature, and become successful; you want them to start their own families, both to provide the manna of your golden years—grandkids, and also so they can be tormented with their own willful children, driving them nuts, as did they to you—not exactly wanting revenge, but damn close to it; you want space, time, and quiet to get to know your significant other, the one who you married to spend your life with, to learn why you fell in love, to learn to love them more and more, to someday sit back and recount your life with them as you fill in one another’s gaps in memory.
About one third to one half your waking hours are devoted to work so your can provide a life for the family—a life and family you, at best directly participate less than one tenth of your time, what with all the distractions of yourself and of the other family members; distractions such as your friends, house and car repairs, attending required functions that either further your career, your social standing, or your church or civic duties.
Then there’s the distractions of your significant other, who has functions similar to yours, should she be a career-person, as well, or if she works at running the household, she has things such as maintaining the house, shopping, scheduling all the kids’ events, chauffeuring the kids to said events or to friend’s houses, etc.
And the kids have school, school functions, friends, the mall, sleeping whenever they can, television, electronic games where they live in virtual worlds for hours on end, and sundry other distractions.
Each segment of your life requires you to play a role: student, friend lover, husband, provider, father, teacher, and disciplinarian, amongst others. Many roles have sub-roles you have to play, such as a provider, depending on how the providing is achieved, may encompass roles such as: leader, co-worker, toady, sometime-teacher, sometime-student, salesman, etc. There are literally dozens of roles and sub-roles for each person during life, and these roles are not necessarily aligned to who you were, or who you are, but tend to influence who you will become.
All the foregoing is to allow the following statement: When we were young we thought we knew who we were, who we would become, and that this was a straight-line progression throughout our life. Yeah, right! I am so far off this life-line, I am sure whoever I once was would not recognize me, nor I , him.
My opening statement regarding the past arising as if yesterday is a factual statement, I just wonder about the fictional past that arises. The roles I have played, the scant time actually spent in direct familial activities, the effects of health on my psyche, and the simple passage of time, have sucked so much of me out of me, I cannot believe I remember an actuality rather than a heavily tinted—maybe tainted—creation of the committee I was during this passage through life. Does it matter?
Perception is reality. So, whether the memories are clear recollection of events, or merely the threads, from residual perceptions within me from each of life’s roles, woven into a mental wall-hanging, depicting how life seemed, doesn’t really matter. You would think this would reduce the power of these memories and their effect upon us. After all, why should these quasi-fictional memories not be edited to the point our past was idyllic, instead of mundane, or even horrible?
Would we be lying to ourselves with this editing of the fictional past compiled by the role-perceptions, the spatial-closure used to fill-in the ninety percent of the time we were not with our family, and the graying out as our brain deteriorates? Does this thinking lead to a happier dotage, or is it a prelude to dementia? Not sure I care.
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