numb

People can bend any circumstance to their will. They have this innate ability to modify their memories.  Paint themselves in any light.  Best of all, they believe it to be truth.  One can suppress entire blocks of memory, crushing them like a sheet of aluminum foil in the hands of a child.  Yet, while the pieces can still be picked apart again, they’ll be wrinkled, with little holes torn out.

There are great memories.  The first time at the waterfalls, suspended as thirty feet of air rushes past, landing in a pool twelve feet deep and eight feet round.  The adrenaline – the rush of life, the emotion –can be traced back to the core of that memory.  It’s an emotional attachment used to remember that this memory happened, all without remembering the events before and after that moment.  This emotion shoots straights to the core of that coiled tuft of aluminum.  Unfolding that unfolds the memory next to it.  Kissing a girl in that water, thankful that the fresh flowing water was barely fifty degrees on a balmy summer’s afternoon.  The feel of her swimsuit underneath wrinkled hands, gripping skin as tightly as fabric.  Squishing toes into the loam beneath the falls, while thrusting a head under the cascading water.  The smell of the detritus as it would give a spongy retreat under fingers and nails, all while stumbling along hidden pathways back to the roads.

This links to memories of the people this time was spent with.  They were an escape hatch; they were a way out of the sinking ship.  They were smiles and bad jokes, smugglers of food and purveyors of peace, and they were friends.  Even when waking and sleeping both happened next to enemies and hate, they were the conspirators and companions.   Long walks through a forest in the middle of nowhere, with that constant tick of time clanging along the moments left until the locked doors would be checked.

There were nights in darkness and screaming.  Pain; there was a lot of pain.  It’s interesting how pain is the easiest thing to block out, but it can be such a defining characteristic:  How the pain is dealt with; how the pain sculpts and molds a personality.  The knee-jerk reaction to avoid it, always preceding the moment where the pain itself can be the shield.  Pain is not only physical; it can also be emotional or psychological.  If it can be perceived, it can be transferred.  Where tolerance is shown, it will be resisted in transference.  When obedience is commanded, fear will be transferred.

If both fear and pain exist, there will be revolutions.  Ways of thinking; ways of living – they will all be altered in a way to push back.  There were rainy thunderstorms spent on rooftops not fighting with siblings, but getting to know them – commiserating.  There is the bond of family, and there is the bond of those who have been through the same hardships.  This transcends family; it transcends love. 

Regrettably, its foundation – or, at least the emotion leading like yarn back to the ball of aluminum – is remembered in every facet of the relationship.  This is where the human ability to block memories – to rewrite perceived life – is amazing.

Taking a perception of the world and changing it doesn’t change the world: It changes how the world sees you.  It’s the ability a person has to bend their perceived world around them to be what they want, all by becoming the instrument through which we change the world as seen fit.  There lies unique and untapped potential to rewrite the self, yet so many dwell on misery, fear, and pain as the basis for their worldview.

And that, my friends, was a choice they made.  How have you let your past create you?  Are you a victim of circumstance, or a champion over it?   Are you living in any way because a series of events in the past dictates you should, or, are you allowing yourself to learn from the past and moving into the future by choosing your own edict?

We are not the binary outcome of events: we are human beings.  We have the right, and the ability, to choose our mindset – our worldview.  Why choose sadness?