There are three kinds of history:

The first is what really happened, and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort.  The third is what people in power wanted the future to think happened, and that is 90% of the history in books.  (M. Gruber) 

I have been reading an intriguing book by Diane Ackerman titled An Alchemy of Mind, which explains in great detail how our minds are an occurrence of events rather than a physical entity. Or more precisely, an occurrence of events (mind) within a physical entity (brain). And how they are responsible for our memories, our language, our motivations, and our desires. Some of the things that we register are illusions and not actual experiences, but the mind can barely distinguish fact from fiction. 

In this post I’m going to focus on memory because it is our memories which give us our sense of who we are. Seeing that so much depends on our state of mind at any given time, who we are can change from day to day, especially as we age and our memories become more customized to our progression. We are the sum of our memories. Change your memory and you change your identity. (Ackerman) 

A good example are the memories we have which are inspired by the media. As they so sneakily depose our personal histories, a realm of faux memory is spoon fed to us and we tend to appropriate what we see -the stories and the images- as our own. We are susceptible and easily confused about suggestions made to us.  If we hear often enough that a certain event occurred, let’s say, causing your younger sister to break her nose on the cobblestone sidewalk, we actually tend to assign a memory to her breaking her nose, even the flow of blood or the punishment received, and not the suggestion.  

This all leads to a false memory where I cannot be considered to be lying if I insist on believing my fictional memory. What begins as a lie gains status as a memorable truth. Tell a lie often enough and it blends into your autobiography. And when that happens you become devilishly difficult to detect as a liar.  (Ackerman)

Who do we imagine ourselves to be? Which are nearer to the truth? The stories we reveal about ourselves or those that our culture reveals about us? Particularly since what we really live is lost in our perceptions of our experiences. Life is what we see in our mind’s eye. And that continues to change.

I was always looking for myself in the people that I loved. I looked at their lovely clean faces and saw myself reflected in them.  They, on the other hand, looked at me and saw the dirt on my face, and however intelligent or self-confident they were, they ended up seeing themselves reflected in me and thinking that they were worse than they were. Paulo Coelho

This entry is not so much a confession as a plea for forgiveness. My flaws and foibles are many and it has taken me a long time to realize the extent of the hurt they have caused. I’ve excelled at entangling myself over and over in scary and dangerous situations, disregarding requests to withdraw until too late. I had stopped walking, forcing my love to do the same.

Hopelessness. The death of truth.  Living paralyzed in fear of messing up.  Offering logical, brilliant judgments, which ran entirely against our real feelings. The spin of language and ideas, while all along something deeper and more profound was taking place in our marriage.

I’ve come to realize that I didn’t have a relationship with my husband, but rather with a bunch of simple ideas and prejudices which all pointed in the same direction: that I was right and he was wrong. We each had become our own team, and I was so focused in winning against him. But a marriage isn’t a brokering of one’s power over another. And it is tragic to know what a marriage should and shouldn’t be, and not live it.

Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to be close to him, to his thoughts and to his feelings. To the truth and the struggle. To being open and honest and loving, not besotted and gaga and infatuated (well that too, but in good measure.  I want this transformation in our marriage, because I love him. It is as simple as that. I pledge to live love.

If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and to make it the object of our game; and the game is the only thing of importance in a world without importance.  Milan Kundera

Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, “Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.  Faith is walking face first and full speed into the dark.  Elizabeth Gilbert

If someone were to weigh the beauty of moonlight against the depth of human cruelty, which would win?  Alice Hoffman

I often feel aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over. At the same expressions, phrases and metaphors repeated.  And the worst is, when I hear myself and have to admit I too repeat the eternally same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare these words, worn out by being used millions of times.  Do they still have any meaning? Are they still an expression of thoughts?  Pascal Mercier

I found it eerie how everyone had been talking only to themselves. Everyone always acts as if it were different. As if it were enormously important what they said.  Pascal Mercier