Begin Stream of Thought
I guess this little chapter in my life is rather short, and I don’t expect to remember it for long. I will be getting married in 3 weeks. I graduated from college and moved to Colorado Springs to begin my career as a web-designer about 2 months ago. I am very anxious to be married to Becca, but it still feels weird to think about the fact that I will soon have “a wife”. It’s a crazy thought, but exciting at the same time. Becca has been completely focused on getting each of the multitudinous items on her list completed before the big day.
So, I was wondering if this is technically my bachelorhood. I’m out of college, and living on my own, but I have felt so close to Becca for the past 3 years of my life that I hardly consider myself a bachelor. The balance between work and every other priority in my life will never be easy. Right now I have few immediate priorities. Becca and the wedding are certainly a priority above work, but there is little chance for conflict there considering the geographical separation between myself and upcoming matrimonial event..
Being so far from my fiancé is difficult, we have a long distance relationship with each other before, yet this time it feels much different. I feel a much deeper connection to her, and along with that comes a more profound concern for her well-being.
I suppose I have gotten on to this track in my mind because she should be here any minute. I am sitting in my our apartment writing this post and waiting for her, along with her parents, to pull up with fully loaded vehicles. We will be unloading massive quantities of her belongings into this miniscule apartment. We already have boxes stacked to the ceiling in the living room. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there is one stack of cardboard cartons that brushes the ceiling. It’s truly the summit of the mountain that has only begun to take shape.
When you sort through your belongings during the process of moving, you feel like you are sifting through a record of your life. You see real tangible evidence to confirm the validity of your memories. I wonder if sometimes we find ourselves unable to throw certain belongings away because we feel like we might lose those memories. The line between memory and reality is only an instant wide. Therefore memory is often our perceived reality, what we would call the present may actually be nothing more than a vast set of memories encompassing the past minutes, hours or days. We tell ourselves that we live in the present, but the present is all memory. So, in reality, our thoughts are always processing data from the past, we are always thinking in the past.
To be continued…
Several Days Later…
The realm of thought encompasses our entire existence at the most basic verifiable level. Descartes held this as a part of his philosophy. He began with the assumption that scientifically could not prove any of his assumptions. He called into question the very nature of the universe, and ultimately his own existence. He was only able to recover from his precipitously close call with thinking himself out of existence, by realizing that they very fact that he is able to think is an indication that something must exist to think those very thoughts, and be conscious of them, therefore he must exist as a consciousness.
My philosophy professor would probably be appalled at rough interpretation what I remember from that class, but what I do remember serves to further the point I am attempting to reach about memories.
We live in the past, through our memories, always filtering new data to see if it is related to any of our memories, and then storing that new data as memories for future use. It’s a necessary and integral function of our brain. If I get caught up thinking to much about the past I start to doubt the validity of certain memories. I have feelings associated with some memories, and those feelings seem to lend a certain verification to those memories, but feelings are just feelings, less concrete that memories, but in so many ways more real. I think Becca doubts her memories less, and sometimes recalls things more vividly because of the strength of her feelings. She, like many women apparently, lives and thinks with her feelings more often than reason or logic. I sometimes wonder how she is able to function at all without the reason and logic that I find so necessary. Yet, her memory is far greater than mine, it may be unrelated, but I wonder if the strength of her remembered feelings adds a whole new layer to memory that I could never hope to experience.
Objects that we keep to remind us of certain events and people are very nice to have around, but are ultimately just clutter and most are useless. That’s the logic and reason talking, I think memorabilia stir up feelings more than memories and are therefore more important to someone that has strong feeling associations with memories. Everyone has some amount of objects that help anchor their memories in reality. Destroying or removing these objects is sometimes so difficult because it is destroying your own life. If you live in memory all the time, then keep-sakes are something that anchor your own existence in the reality that you perceive, and throwing out these things can seem like killing a small part of yourself.
Ending stream of thought, Goodnight.