Yesterday as I was walking from my Women's Studies class back to the Psychology building I realized that I seem to feel really good when I come out of that class. My euphoric appreciation of colors happened after that class. I don't know if it is the time of day, the weather, or enjoyment of the class but I feel good. This time it was triggered by a sudden breeze against my face, strong enough to make my eyes blink behind my glasses, and the hair lift from my face. I felt myself smiling and turning my face into the wind. I love that feeling of the wind caressing me (don't much care for it though when it gets down below freezing and becomes a numbing biting wind). Instantly my spirits lifted into that place where all is right with the world.
I watched the leaves cascading from the trees, caught by the wind, gliding on the air. They dove around me and skittered past. One lovely reddish maple leave whirled around and around in a tight circle as if spinning in a dance and slowly dropped to the earth. Others sailed on by like little airboats and I turned to watch them in their flight until they landed. Several skimmed my head, landed in my hair then blew off and on their way.
And I felt like myself. This optimistic, full enjoyment of my surroundings is the way I remember myself from years ago. I have always thought of myself as easily pleasured, primed to enjoy what is happening around me. Yet somehow in the ensuing years when I wasn't looking, gradually I imagine, that seemed to have changed until I am caught up in the daily grind, the classes, the study, the tests, the grades, the worries about getting in to grad school, the worries about the future, about money, about interpersonal difficulties that I have had more of in the last few years. I don't even remember when this all overcame my usual way of being - I don't even know anymore if this is a fiction that I tell myself, a story of who I would like to be instead of who I have been (though I remember being that way in the past).
Knowing that we re-edit our memories, adding in newer material and understandings to old memories, adding in things that never happened but we thought of a lot, knowing how difficult it really is to know what objectively happened in the past, being aware of the research showing how flexible memory can be I have this part of myself that seems to question, even when I truly feel that I am remembering accurately, to ask what is reality anyway? And while I do not necessarily show anyone that uncertainty, since others are so sure of their memories and would take my existential doubt for weakness and assume that they are right in what they remember when I doubt that as well, still I wonder.
Copyright © 2000 Kyril Oakwind