Selective Memory
Do you ever wonder why you are aware of,
Notice and remember some things but not others?
How some moments stick with you
For a lifetime, but others are forgotten
Almost instantly without a care?
These vivid moments are the same
In waking life or dream time,
Giving us an experience
Of gestalt involving our whole being,
Where we are in the moment
A sensual being, alert
In physical, emotional, mental completeness
And yet also somehow simultaneously outside it,
Experiencing it afresh and vivid
Truly for the first time
With the clear, calm, wondrous
Eyes of the soul.
It’s easy and tempting to explain it all
Through a physical cause and effect process,
A triggered reaction of neural transmitters
In the control center of our brain.
But although this is observably the case
It doesn’t explain
Why such a reaction is triggered
Why such neural networks
And transmitting chemicals
Even exist in the first place, and
Why and how the moment then remains
Fresh and vivid and memorable our whole lives.
Those are questions of mystery
And mystery by definition
Holds itself within a veil of questions
Something glimpsed, felt deep
In our bones, or there at the tip of our tongue
Beyond reach yet somehow known,
But not always remembered.
A mystery which resists our grasping
Which morphs and expands when we think
We have it,
And yet never really goes away
Always dancing right there
Clearly within sight in those vivid moments
Or just hinted at in our peripheral vision,
Or somewhere in orbit way out far beyond
Possible apprehension and comprehension,
Depending on what we have the connection,
Attention and interest, to notice
Experience and remember.
But through it all
The mystery remains
Dancing there,
Or should I say
Right here,
Engaging us in a life
That is both peculiarly ours
And still universally theirs
Knowing in our bones
The two, while not the same,
Are really no different,
The ultimate beauty being
This connection
Can never be lost or changed
Whether we know it or not.
(10/31/25)
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