Some recent reading I’ve been doing related to the memoir indicates that physicists now more or less support the idea that time is not linear or progressive but rather a mental construct. In reality, apparently, everything that has, is, or will be happening exists in the soup of the universe and we select our now. Even if I truly understood the work, which I do not, the idea that people elect their reality, their now is quite astonishing especially when so many folks I know elect to stay in a specific moment for years, sometimes forever.
Without grasping the fundamentals, I may have this wrong, but the idea that this time selection is personal and yet not entirely free-willed helps me better release frustration and anger with my ex and others who persist in endless rehashings of hurts and harms now over and done. I am trying not to do the same and not to react when their rehashings do not square with any reality I ever lived. To say, “you don’t remember” as a way to erase my lived experience is infuriating, but the truth is that details do slip away when you let go. And if they continue to live those moments or years over and over and over, they are more present for them, though they shift each and every time they are relived.
Turns out the metaphors and other language we use about trauma may be spot on. I’m not sure how this relates to the slippage of memory, but it must. Still, it seems you truly can get stuck at that precise moment of pain and anger and act out from that place over and over and over again. Until you choose to move to another moment in time.
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
Jan. 14, 2016
Ruminations 