Going out of my mindset
My brain and body have been hard-wired toward action, which is beneficial under certain circumstances but comes with a cost.
The nature of memory haunts me.
Why are seemingly inconsequential moments in life, some of them decades old, crystal clear when brought up for recall?
Why are other things we would love to remember more clearly either foggy or gone altogether?
Is some of it random? Is some of it that we don’t fully understand what is memorable in the moment, but some piece of us is making sure we hold onto it as we wind through life?
Has some of our need for memory been eradicated by the fact that almost all of us carry around cameras and pull them out constantly to capture moments?
Or are thousands of photos stored on our smartphone camera rolls and selectively shared on social media a poor proxy for actually remembering things and really experiencing them?
Do I assign too much value to my ability to remember something that happened, or conversely my inability to do so?
Having spent a lot of time thinking about these questions over the years, and having the general philosophy that there usually isn’t just one right question or one perfect answer, I know that I might never really know.
But my sense is that the ability to be present has a profound impact on the retention of memories, particularly positive ones. It should not be surprising that my lived experience is to recall things later with greater clarity after experiencing them with the right balance of lightness and intention as they happened.
My struggle — the haunt — resides in the gaps of my memory.
Knowing the difference between being present and not being present, plus thinking about how or why I am or am not able to be present, leads me to the conclusion that in far too many cases in life I have not been present.
I instead often have existed on a focused, driven plane of existence — informed at times by a stubborn resolve to accomplish a task, and at others by a fight-or-flight response to discomfort or trauma.
Part of my journey in the last two years, as I have worked to make healthy changes in my life, has been a recognition of and ability to catch myself when I start to slip out of “present” mode and into that harder-to-define plane.
The best I can describe that less-desired state is a sort of high-speed cruise control with blinders on. The reference that makes me think of this mode the most comes from a book (but don’t read it right now): Kurt Vonnegut’s “Timequake,” in which his oft-referenced fictional character Kilgore Trout writes a memoir titled, “My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot.”
I don’t lose a decade, thankfully, but sometimes weeks go by and I can barely remember what happened.
This is useful for shorter bursts like hours, and it is a valuable skill for being able to hit a deadline. Just put your head down, dig into the work, and know that it will get done.
It was a helpful skill over the last two weeks, as my wife and I took on the sometimes absurd task of trying to get our house ready to put on the market while still handling all the other regularly scheduled parts of our busy lives.
I don’t like being told I can’t do something, and neither does she, so we hunkered down and we worked. Every spare moment was accounted for with some house-related task.
I learned where you take old paint to get recycled and made my first trip to the dump to get rid of excess garbage, and none of it seemed strange at all. Tasks were squeezed into impossibly small pockets of time.
It was all just part of an abstract checklist, and we wouldn’t know we were done until we were done. (For an extra degree of difficulty, I scheduled our dog to have a surgery he could have had any other time in the past months or coming months the very morning we listed the house).
You heard enough about the what in my last post, as I shared my feelings on mulch. This is about the aftermath, or at least what is soon to be the aftermath.
I went out my mindset.
No, not out of my mind. I’m OK — tired or fried, take your pick, but still OK. That said, I failed countless times when it came to being fully present in the moment, and that’s hard to reconcile.
I slipped into that familiar and even comfortable space of doing over experiencing, in part out of necessity but in part because that slice of me is still there.
The house looks great, and there is a sense of pride in that accomplishment. It’s the process that has me in a reflective mood.
My best self-analysis: I struggle, and have always struggled, with things that are unsettled. My attempt to combat the feeling of unsettledness often leads me to try to gain control over the situation — something that can require a massive amount of work and effort.
And when I get into that mode, I tend to add even more to my overfull plate than is really necessary. Days become a blur and my wife describes me as “amped up.” I’m the frenzied, impatient version of myself.
When it’s all over and I can slow down even a little, I barely remember what happened.
The counter: Sometimes that’s just how life is. And if it was a stressful time, why would you want to remember it?
The counter-counter: If part of the stress is self-induced, and there might be a way to do everything at a more reasonable pace that didn’t require the sort of frenzy that takes me out of the present, wouldn’t that be preferable?
It comes down to the biggest work that remains for me: Getting better at handling stress and making peace with the discomfort of unknowns.
I at least had a few moments in the past couple weeks when better versions of myself peeked through the clouds.
In the future, I guess I just have to remember to remember those times.
It does not seem possible that April is almost over, but here we are. A natural consequence of all the work on the house and the tunnel vision mindset I was in is that my creative process was stalled out for a little while. I’m very much looking forward to jump-starting my brain and once again writing weird notes on my phone app that lead to essays instead of lists of things to buy like “big potted outdoor plant or tree/shrub.”
The last odd little note entry was from late March, way too long ago. But here it is: “We’re not just crossing the bridge when we get to it. We are building the bridge while we cross it.”
In the midst of all the hustle, I found comfort in a story about the … Vikings draft? Yes, I did. Reading this quote from Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah about his exhaustion preparing for the draft gave me some perspective: “Everything my mom ever told me, it was about, 'Put everything you can into it, and the process will take care of itself,' and I know we did that.”
Ah, being present. That's a tough one. When you're busy, it's hard to have a level of concentration beyond doing the tasks, as you have clearly stated. But even when people aren't busy, they're not present enough. For example, how many times have you met someone, and just a little later you can't remember their name? It's because people aren't present enough. When someone is reading something and gets to the bottom of the page and says, "What the hell did I just read?" and they have to read the page again--that's a result of not being present while reading.
Indeed, not being present happens to all of us. How could anyone be present all the time? So we need to give ourselves a little slack regarding our not being present enough. Only a little slack though. For if we aren't present as much as we reasonably can be, we don't learn. And if people don't learn, they don't develop critical thinking skills--which can lead to an egomanical, lying, selfish con-man in the White House.