Another World, Another Time, in the Age of Wonder
Is our memory illusory? Are the vector maps of neurotransmitter mixtures changing over time? .. Perhaps that malleability of memory is the most beautiful quality..
Patterned thoughts going through my head, off and on this past week of major change, being back in The Valley* yet again. My career took off here, just down the way crisscrossed in and amongst Central, Thomas, Tasman, Stevens Creek, Mathilda, and Lawrence.. and during every cycle when I left, departed via remote work, surely never to return!
One cannot escape the loop. Is it truly Sisyphean if the endless hill is worn flat, the endured evolved into appreciation for its challenge? The illusion then shows its edge, beautiful, glinting reflections from facets ever-changing, never-ending.
> Another World, Another Time, in the Age of Wonder..
The mind loves to travel through time these days; reflecting upon the trajectory, occasionally in weariness of wonder that life has become its inevitability - the duality from which I could never grasp in so many years passed. The sunsets in those days felt brighter, more luminous, unfiltered by the long-evolving tumor's stranglehold on the Optic Chiasm - our eye's connection to the brain.
> When single shines the triple sun, What was sundered and undone, Shall be whole, the two made one..
Where then, in the latter half of 2022 at the start of treatment? Seemingly perpetually resting in bed, dealing with first and second order side effects from a barrage of eight medications, either targeting the tumor or attempting to shore-up defenses from those side effects. Rapidly, one loses patience and interest in rest.
How about in 2017? Fiji island hopping, searching for demise or salvation, whichever may come first.
Months later? Where else but Nicoya, Costa Rica seeking refuge from those internal storms. I still have that pseudo-military ripstop hat, or rather am on iteration four or five of the same design - very good for napping at airport terminals, or knocking out at the beach.
Or decades ago, seasons ago, seeking solace among the silence of snowy peaks alone. When prompted for "where do you want to go to college?", nowhere, I wanted to go to Talkeetna, Alaska and be in the mountains. My best friend died that November, and everything changed.
All of those years, the endless dreams, and seemingly endless sunrises... the recording of those events into neural maps, shuffled off from primary storage over the decades until some periodic recall request.. affected then by environmental factors, by potential cerebral injury, perhaps menopausal hormone shifts.
Is our memory illusory? Are the vector maps of neurotransmitter mixtures changing over time? Yes they are. Still yet, we have no magnetic tapes at Iron Mountain which could store them all, and we have no set method to statically write them to anything other than occasional video or foto medium - film or digital - even the method may shift the impression and the recall.
Perhaps that malleability of memory, its neural alterations inevitable, is the most beautiful quality which growing older finally affords. ❤️
Footnotes and References
[1] 'The Valley', in reference to Silicon Valley, the standard California epicenter of the tech-sector.
