Realizing and Owning are not the Same Experience

I realized this a long time ago… Unfortunately realizing it isn’t living it! It’s not “owning” the thing you realize.

A visualization:

We use timelines to represent time, which make sense if you’re charting a history and future of scheduled distinct events.

But it isn’t what’s going on in our brains. I think a representation for my own conscious existence is more like three extremely different parts:

There’s the past. I always thought of it as a structured sort of library. But I realize now, it’s a junk draw that just keeps getting bigger and/or more crowded and disorganized.

There’s the future: I used to think of it as an exciting amusement park of pure fun and maybe it is, but I’m going to add that it’s covered in a very thick fog.

And then there’s the now. A conveyor belt coming out of the fog going faster than you can handle with all sorts of random things just flying at you, yet never getting any closer to the amusement park. And then just spilling into that junk drawer.

I think people can be very different (some people’s junk drawers are extremely organized and huge, while mine has a big incinerator in it, burning up so many memories), and they also have very different experiences of the now and the future.

But this is my experience. Annoying brain.

I have discovered though that I can slow the conveyor belt just a little, but only alone in silence with a keyboard and a blank screen.

Sort of like now.