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Do you know how many fleeting thoughts pass through your existence that are never to be seen again? Some you're vaguely aware of, some are marginal, peripheral feelings that are present for mere microseconds.
This quote, from the second book of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, has been on an endless loop in my mind for years.
"He was also, according to his file, 'a first-rate scientist partial to beer,' the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle."
For as long as I can remember I've wished to have the ability to document or remember those passing thoughts. The ones that make up the majority of your random access memory but typically go unnoticed or forgotten. The ones that disappear before they fully form.
All those thoughts take place in the space between the words we speak. They're infinite. They're inevitable. They're beautiful.
And they're weird.
Even if you have the wherewithal to write them down, they are rarely substantial enough to make anything from. Thoughts are fleeting. Moments pass and they are gone forever. Does this bother anyone else?
The state of the universe constantly in flux, refusing to sit still long enough for me to comprehend a fraction of it.
Imagine if we had a way to capture these thoughts. Or harness them.
What are you thinking right now? Can you consciously bring it to mind? You notice these thoughts in your periphery but can never focus on them. They're like eye-floaters: as soon as you try and focus on them they disappear.
Have you ever gone to a doctor or a therapist, and when they ask how you are, you answer, "Great! Never been better! I don't even know why I'm here!"
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Tonight I looked around the kitchen at the negligible mess. It wasn't terrible; we've made much worse. The innocent moments would be here and gone before being noticed. A small cup left on the table half-full of milk that would be cheese in the morning. An innocent Happy Meal toy, likely to be thrown away after being ignored for months.
I pulled out my phone and took a picture of it in the dim light of midnight. When I see that picture again, will I remember why I took it? Will I remember that I was taking notice of something so mundane that the very mundanity made it interesting?
Sometimes I take pictures of a messy room, or the way a pen sits on a surface, knowing things will never be this way again.
These tiny molehill moments add up to mountains of memory. A billion innocent and benign memories add up to life.
A few months ago I took some of my kids' old toys to donate, and a moment of harsh sadness washed over me. Maybe I'd seen too many Toy Story movies, but I couldn't help thinking that those toys were bought and given with vast oceans of love. More than that, it represented all the time that had gone by, and how that time would never come back. Romanticizing the past is a dangerous game.
I had an idea for a science fiction story a few years ago about this. What if we could offload those innocent, meaningless thoughts and keep them in a database somewhere? What would it look like?
Would it feel like a kind of therapy? To eliminate all the busyness in our minds? Would we ever want to read them? Could we? Could we read them like a stream-of-consciousness novel? Or would we even want to? Maybe they're too much for our conscious minds to handle.
I love deep conversations and deep thoughts. Who has time for the simple? My entire life has been in search of the profound.
Those deep, fulfilling conversations were partly responsible for my drinking problem. I loved conversation while drinking. They could be deep and meaningful, though I see them now as complete and utter drivel. I would swallow the liquid social lubricant with friends and out on the song that made my soul shake. Then the conversation took unexpected turns and spins out of control before being lost to the ether.
Are thoughts the same even if you're under the influence? Do they still matter? Maybe when we upload the random thoughts the ones where we were inebriated will be in italics.
Maybe those thoughts floating in the periphery of life are just as important as the conscious ones.