Memories

I've been experiencing a lot of memories lately, and I've thought a lot about what memories are and aren't.

What they are is spontaneous. I can't control or prevent them from arising. Probably the only way not to have memories is to have amnesia and I can't even imagine what that would be like. The only thing I can control is my emotional response to memories. There was a time when I couldn't do that. I would have memories of times and incidents that were emotionally painful or humiliating for me and I would be thrust right back into the pain and discomfort of that moment and situation. Not as intensely, not as despairingly. That has changed. Now I experience most memories without all the emotional baggage.

I don't even know if or when I wanted that to happen. I think by the time I knew that you could actually achieve that I was becoming aware that I was on my way. I don't know if it's aging, or if its meditation and contemplation. I just know that I have aged and I meditate and I contemplate and now it is different.

I remember when my relationship with L ended. Prior to being together I was almost crippled by fear. I was afraid of violence. I was afraid of being caught sleeping and off guard and losing my life in painful ways as a result. At one point in my life that was a realistic fear, but it hadn't been for many years, yet I still experienced aloneness as if it was still my reality. I didn't like to live alone because I feared the fear so much. I feared the sleepless nights, the nightmares and anxiety. The twelve years we were together I lived under the belief that if alone I would experience that again on a daily basis. Then we broke up.

When we parted ways I decided I really wanted to live alone. I was afraid, not of being killed or harmed. I was afraid the fear would be there again and that it would be all encompassing like it had been in the past. I moved into an apt. alone and it didn't happen. I wasn't afraid. I didn't have fear of being alone, of being harmed, of being caught off guard. I was comfortable alone. I felt safe and enjoyed the quiet and freedom that it brought me. I didn't know until I had tested it, until I had put myself in the position to confront it, that it had fallen away during the course of maturing. I had become the person I wanted to be and I hadn't known it until then.

And now I am moving into another area of realizing that who I thought I was has changed. I am experiencing it as a sense of loss. Loss is a weird thing. It makes me very aware. I am aware of the absence of something that I have been accustomed to being part of my psyche or my physical experience. Loss, for me, is awareness of absence, and it is often a relief and a liberating experience though it can also feel strange, scary, and sad. Loss is adjusting to the absence of something I have had to live with. Even if that thing was an obstacle, as they often are, I experience the absence of it as loss. But I know that it's ok, and actually I want to experience more. I want to lose more assumptions, obstacles, preconceived notions of my abilities and opportunities.

I would like my life to be stripped bare of all barriers that prevent me from reaching my full potential as a human being. And what would that look like? What would my life be like if I were living, thinking, functioning to my fullest? I don't even know. And isn't that the point? To imagine what it would look like would be to put some kind of parameters around it. To establish a high water mark, so to speak, for what "fullest" would look like. Maybe I am at this very moment living to my fullest capacity. But will that be true tomorrow? Or the next day?