On relationships, objects and accessories
February 14th, 2011 § 2 Comments
Life is, from one perspective, a process of collection. Everything that you learn and experience adds to your perpetually changing mind state; it all changes you as a person. In essence, any single moment that you encounter will play a part in your future mindset by altering your present mindset, much like a step in the Markov chain that is your thought process. Considering this, it is very important to habitualize yourself to accepting information and experiencing events that won’t have too much of a negative consequence on your future self.
Even if you believe that you can handle resisting profoundly stupid ideas, cognitive strain and the insidious nature of ideas will inevitably filter down into an outcome that alters your future behaviour if only ever so slightly. This is also true of the attachments that you make to other people, other things, and any augmentations that become part of your life. You might disagree with me at this stage, possibly thinking that the more you experience, the bigger your library of experiences and learned lessons is, which means that you’ll be ready to go ahead and not make the same mistake again. Sadly, your memory will fail you in that regard, possibly repeatedly, and you’ll only be increasing the probability of this behaviour by strengthening the pathways between the synapses of your fallible human brain.
To use an example to bring this vague wording to light, think back to something that you’ve associated with a previously good experience. The reason for this association is that it was concomitant with something that you’ve already found pleasurable. Perhaps you were impartial to the associative object or experience prior to the association, or you were positively disposed to it – either way – but at some stage you had a falling out with a person linked to the association, or anything that subsequently made the original good experience an appurtenance to the overriding memory. Now both have been deemed negative merely due to the fact that they both remind you of the most recent memory of either thing – a negative memory. You’ve allowed association to ruin a perfectly good thing by accepting additional inventory into your life.
The idea that I’m trying to get across is that life might have a diminishing point of returns for additions and by allowing new things into your life, you not only don’t augment your being with them but you actually guarantee a diminution of one or more things from any addition subsequent to the first one (assuming any loose relationship between the two). If I haven’t lost you completely by now, you’d might have realised that I’d like to reintroduce the Stoic lifestyle mentally, and a minimalist lifestyle physically. What fortune has not given you, she cannot take away.
Many years ago, the first time my husband and I, uh, were intimate, a song was playing on the radio. It became ‘our song’.
A few years later, we were at a party, and my husband had had a little too much to drink. And the song came on. He made mean, derogatory, remarks about the song and it’s meaning, to his friends.
He tried to make up for it, and apologised often. I forgave him, and we moved on. It was not such a big deal. But until this day, I cannot hear that song without experiencing anger and sadness.
Is that what you were talking about?
The unexpected can hold important lessons, part of our learning process, some walk to reach a destination others set off on a journey of discover, the destination is not as meaningful as the process of simply enjoying the experience along the way.