If you believe or imagine that we're all, essentially, experiments, each given our portion of infinite experience, perhaps somewhere even watched, our responses, conclusions and actions recorded ... well then, for God's sake, at least make 'em laugh.
I was I don’t know how young, but too young to talk, toddling tabula rasa around the living room, when I had a sudden, dawning realization: They didn’t get me. I’m still me.
Pause for a moment I’d call an existential “huh?”
Quite logically, really, my eventual next thought was: Still?
With that question I stretched my blossoming little memory as far back as it would go. And to my surprise, it was pretty far.
Instantly, I was back ... somewhere. At full, adult height, standing with a small group of others. There had been a discussion, an understanding. I’d just agreed to something.
Facing them, I felt, for lack of a better word, whole. I knew myself - and loved myself - utterly, completely; I was thoroughly, blissfully conscious. Fear, had there been any thought of it, was nonexistent.
They watched as I stepped to the edge of some kind of portal and leapt in.
I became liquidlike, bodiless, in that instant. My consciousness swirled in a vortex, and “I” spun and spun. Fragments of “me” broke free, forming separate entities like icons on a computer screen, and were swept away. I knew them then to be my past lives, individualized banks of memory, being torn from me, one by one.
No, I said to myself. I agreed to go, but I did not agree to forget.
I understood somehow that releasing these stores of memory was meant to be part of the plan, not some punishment, but I didn’t care. I felt that with the last of them would go any trace, all awareness, of who I was.
So I fought as I spun around and around, holding everything of “me” as tightly as I could. Hanging on, you might say, for dear lives. Fighting to keep the icons from spinning off, and losing.
Finally, I lost the fight entirely, spinning out of consciousness. Pure defeat, no surrender.
And I - had I remembered “I” - would have thought that was the end of it.
Until that God-given, revelatory, toddling moment. One second a blank little void, the next alert, changed. I was like an old woman rousing to discover her purseful of jewels rousted in the night, yet relieved to find her ancient virginity intact. I’d lost the treasured accumulations of my past, but kept what I knew as my essence.
Not defeat, entirely, after all.
I summoned all my little toddler will to keep hold of that memory all my life, no matter what.
From that day on, I understood, remembered - the way you remember this morning - that I’d lived before, and between, and would live on. That this experience, this mission, was and would be only one of many. That somewhere, others were waiting for me, and probably watching. That whatever would come of all this, somewhere, for some reason, I’d agreed to it.
And from that day on, all kinds of people could tell me all kinds of things.
But I didn’t have to believe any of them.
Pause for a moment I’d call an existential “huh?”
Quite logically, really, my eventual next thought was: Still?
With that question I stretched my blossoming little memory as far back as it would go. And to my surprise, it was pretty far.
Instantly, I was back ... somewhere. At full, adult height, standing with a small group of others. There had been a discussion, an understanding. I’d just agreed to something.
Facing them, I felt, for lack of a better word, whole. I knew myself - and loved myself - utterly, completely; I was thoroughly, blissfully conscious. Fear, had there been any thought of it, was nonexistent.
They watched as I stepped to the edge of some kind of portal and leapt in.
I became liquidlike, bodiless, in that instant. My consciousness swirled in a vortex, and “I” spun and spun. Fragments of “me” broke free, forming separate entities like icons on a computer screen, and were swept away. I knew them then to be my past lives, individualized banks of memory, being torn from me, one by one.
No, I said to myself. I agreed to go, but I did not agree to forget.
I understood somehow that releasing these stores of memory was meant to be part of the plan, not some punishment, but I didn’t care. I felt that with the last of them would go any trace, all awareness, of who I was.
So I fought as I spun around and around, holding everything of “me” as tightly as I could. Hanging on, you might say, for dear lives. Fighting to keep the icons from spinning off, and losing.
Finally, I lost the fight entirely, spinning out of consciousness. Pure defeat, no surrender.
And I - had I remembered “I” - would have thought that was the end of it.
Until that God-given, revelatory, toddling moment. One second a blank little void, the next alert, changed. I was like an old woman rousing to discover her purseful of jewels rousted in the night, yet relieved to find her ancient virginity intact. I’d lost the treasured accumulations of my past, but kept what I knew as my essence.
Not defeat, entirely, after all.
I summoned all my little toddler will to keep hold of that memory all my life, no matter what.
From that day on, I understood, remembered - the way you remember this morning - that I’d lived before, and between, and would live on. That this experience, this mission, was and would be only one of many. That somewhere, others were waiting for me, and probably watching. That whatever would come of all this, somewhere, for some reason, I’d agreed to it.
And from that day on, all kinds of people could tell me all kinds of things.
But I didn’t have to believe any of them.
