Keeping Loads in Mind

Selective dyslexia or Freudian Slip?

Some days start quite functionally, and today was no exception. I was on LinkedIn, scanning the profile page when my eyes, or is it attention, passed over a function box that said “Upload a file”. Here’s the thing, though – I read this as “Upload a life”.

And this got me thinking and making connections, starting with recalling my common and repetitive keyboard slips, and the odd amusing “typo” that – nowadays anyway – only I would chuckle at, since the people I shared it with at the time are no longer around.

The trouble with all THAT kind of stuff, all the little fragments of our lives that hang, cryogenically suspended in memory waiting for the activating trigger or the breath of fresh air that brings it back to life – into consciousness – is this:-

It all takes up space on the hard drive of our lives, or is like stuff we’ve put up in the loft of our lives ...
PLUS,
When restored into consciousness it then has the potential to derail and disengage us from the Present Moment. 

The longer we spend in reverie or memory, the more the disengagement – and the more the disengagement the more we become almost ‘hypnotised’ by the recollection.

Now we can de-clutter our lofts and our everyday lives by throwing away real and tangible clutter like that – yet can we do that with the hard drives of our lives? 

Our lives have a narrative which is the chronicle of how we’ve got to here from all that has gone before there, so surely the only way we can de-clutter all THAT stuff is when we suffer memory loss?
Isn’t it?

De-clutter the emotional content

Well there is a way, and that begins when we acknowledge the amount of emotion we’ve wrapped around the item, or the event, or the memory. For out of that acknowledgement comes the ability to differentiate between the objective content and the emotional content.

I call it emotional paint, and it is that that we liberally daub onto things, events and memories to make them MORE real, more vivid. We do this with things that are equally happy or sad or all points in between. So when we de-clutter the emotion then we are using emotional “paint stripper” - in essence.

The trouble with emotional content is that our ‘daubing’ often goes on at an unconscious level, so we are sometimes unaware of some of the associations we have coded away.

One of the most powerful associative triggers is smell, or fragrance. We notice a smell and that will take us right back to something or someone that we’ll recollect with total clarity. Then, out of that recollection, will come flooding a whole raft of emotional paint that we’re quite unprepared for. 

Emotional content triggered by fragrance is, I would say, the hardest to de-clutter. The next most powerful – and also the most tangible for me at least - are sounds, and particularly music.

J S Bach – Prelude No.1 in C major BWV 846

My son played this at my mother’s funeral. 

The thing is it is a piece that I am totally aware of and would be likely to re-encounter over and over again in my life going forward. I knew in advance that I needed to restore it to its rightful place in my library of “music that I love”, instead of it being placed on a shelf also containing sad and dark emotions of deep loss. That had happened for me with Albinoni’s Adagio – a very well known piece – that had been played at the funeral of a friend who had died well before his time. Every time I hear it, even now, I am right back at the church and in that part of the service. It was very emotional.

So I went onto You Tube and played every single different version of the Bach piece. Some were played on piano, some on harpsichord – some were played fast and some slow. I heard many different perspectives – and when I was comfortable and ready, I knew then that my association of the piece with my Mum’s funeral had ceased to be on the wrong shelf.

Emotional stripping, de-cluttering and de-coding can take many forms, yet the end product is always a realignment of a truer and more objective interpretation of the original – whether it is a person, an event, an action or indeed any experience.

Time was, when I used to find things in my loft or – especially – in an old trunk in my loft, that I would put everything on hold while I revisited the associations, walked the pathways, saw what I saw, heard what I heard and felt what I felt – back THEN.

Now I have an Understanding of what used to take place and rarely, if ever, encounter anything other than what is right here in the Present moment. It IS very liberating and certainly, in the case of the Bach Prelude in C major, I discovered that out of the dissipation of my grief came the most rewarding gift. I see that gift as having come from my mother and it comforts and reassures me that her guidance, advice and presence has never left, and will always be here.

I never set out to obtain such an outcome when I chose to listen to an almost endless number of versions of the Bach, however! Interestingly, I would refer you to the comments Andre Gavrilov makes about the piece. “It is white, “he says, “Just white. It could be angel-like if you wish!”

Afterthought

On reflection when I consider “Upload a Life”, which is where all this started, I am still surprised when I look around and see how little I’ve still brought with me when I upload my life now. The file-size on my hard drive is nothing like it was even five years ago, and especially ten or particularly fifteen years ago. Where has all that content gone?

Perhaps this is why I have so much room to enjoy the day to day stuff now, for I’m more engaged with the Present and have no need to reach for that pot of emotional paint all the time.

So this begs the question which I will ask again! Where has all that content gone – and did I ever need it in the first place?