I’ve been thinking a lot lately about living. That’s not quite right. What I’ve been thinking about is how we perceive our lives and what we find important when we look back on what we’ve experienced. I think we have a tendency to miss what really makes up the whole of the experience.
For example, when you tell stories about your past, what do you talk about? Most likely, you mention who was there and what happened. And that’s usually enough. But it’s really not the whole story. It’s just the most obvious piece of the story.
I’ll use the same example I used on my post on cynicism: Coming back from my parent’s house a few weeks ago, I rode my motorcycle through the rain and into the sun. In a purely clinical sense, that’s all that happened. I was cold and wet, and then I was warm and dry.
But that’s really not the whole story. What really happened was that the cold and wet forced me inside myself, forced me to concentrate so much on my own discomfort that the world faded a little for me, became slightly less real. Then, when the sun broke through, when my wheels were rolling over dry pavement instead of spraying gray water, I got to open up. It wasn’t just that I was dry and warm again, it was a strong emotive reaction at the contrast.
Would you think I was strange if I told you that the experience was also spiritual? That the raising of my spirits caused me to pray? Not formally, not with “thee"s and “thou”s but with an up-turned spirit, with my heart, with the simple word “wow” formed on my lips.
In a purely clinical sense, the second part of my experience, the spiritual and emotive part, could be discounted as a simple reaction to being warm again. It could be argued that my reaction was just so many chemicals flooding my system in response to external stimuli. But to do that, to strip away the “other” from the experience until it’s nothing more than a quantifiable input on my five senses with a predictable emotional (that is, chemical) output, to reduce life to science, is to remove something very real from the experience.
Life is full of moments that go beyond the bounds of simple physical experience. The way time slows a little when you look at the person you love, the despair caused by loss, the indescribable peace that can be found in heartfelt prayer: all of these are more than just physical. To really describe them, to really share them, you can’t just describe actions. Take my first example. The action is simple. “I looked at her.” Big whoop. I look at people all the time. The real story isn’t the looking. The real story is years of emotions and shared experiences all bottled up into one glance. The real story reads more like, “I looked at her, and my heart soared.”
I guess I really just want to say that what happened isn’t the whole story. This world we live in is composed of so many levels that to limit your living just to the surface, just to the physical, is to do yourself a grave injustice.
For example, when you tell stories about your past, what do you talk about? Most likely, you mention who was there and what happened. And that’s usually enough. But it’s really not the whole story. It’s just the most obvious piece of the story.
I’ll use the same example I used on my post on cynicism: Coming back from my parent’s house a few weeks ago, I rode my motorcycle through the rain and into the sun. In a purely clinical sense, that’s all that happened. I was cold and wet, and then I was warm and dry.
But that’s really not the whole story. What really happened was that the cold and wet forced me inside myself, forced me to concentrate so much on my own discomfort that the world faded a little for me, became slightly less real. Then, when the sun broke through, when my wheels were rolling over dry pavement instead of spraying gray water, I got to open up. It wasn’t just that I was dry and warm again, it was a strong emotive reaction at the contrast.
Would you think I was strange if I told you that the experience was also spiritual? That the raising of my spirits caused me to pray? Not formally, not with “thee"s and “thou”s but with an up-turned spirit, with my heart, with the simple word “wow” formed on my lips.
In a purely clinical sense, the second part of my experience, the spiritual and emotive part, could be discounted as a simple reaction to being warm again. It could be argued that my reaction was just so many chemicals flooding my system in response to external stimuli. But to do that, to strip away the “other” from the experience until it’s nothing more than a quantifiable input on my five senses with a predictable emotional (that is, chemical) output, to reduce life to science, is to remove something very real from the experience.
Life is full of moments that go beyond the bounds of simple physical experience. The way time slows a little when you look at the person you love, the despair caused by loss, the indescribable peace that can be found in heartfelt prayer: all of these are more than just physical. To really describe them, to really share them, you can’t just describe actions. Take my first example. The action is simple. “I looked at her.” Big whoop. I look at people all the time. The real story isn’t the looking. The real story is years of emotions and shared experiences all bottled up into one glance. The real story reads more like, “I looked at her, and my heart soared.”
I guess I really just want to say that what happened isn’t the whole story. This world we live in is composed of so many levels that to limit your living just to the surface, just to the physical, is to do yourself a grave injustice.
Comments
I'm frequently told to 'lighten up.'