Examples of sensory time travel:
- Every blackberry that lands on your tongue
reminds you of climbing the rock wall at age 7 with your homeschooled neighbors
and picking all the berries for pancakes the next morning.
- No Doubt’s “Just A Girl” brings you back to the
Tweeter Center lawn where you watched your first concert with your parents at
age 9. Gwen Stefani shouted “I’m just a motherfucking girl” on the last chorus
& your mom told you never to repeat it again. Couldn’t help it.
- The smell of fresh cut grass makes you think of
your first job mowing lawns at 14, listening to Incubus & Lauren Hill on
your CD player everyday, and finding 23 four-leaf clovers during summer break.
- Feeling the texture of a sleeping bag reminds you of the
time you were 21 and you took all your best friends to a monastery on the
hillside to watch the meteor shower, eat peanut butter & jelly sandwiches,
and discuss life.
- Every time you see autumn leaves, you remember
back to school shopping, picking out the perfect pumpkin, making apple pie, and
watching the incredible cult-classic film “Halloween Tree” that only
exists on VHS. No exact age, it’s (still) an annual occurrence.
Five primary senses- sight, sound, taste, smell, and feel. I
think two other useful things for memory are creation and observation. My best
example for both of these is the process of writing your thoughts down (in a journal or on
walls or through a blog). Yes, you are “feeling" the pencil/spraycan/keyboard,
but it's your physical action of documenting your ideas that creates
something unique. Observation is then the mental action that comes into play
when you reread it. Yes, you’re “seeing” the words, but your brain is pulling
them together and repainting the memory.
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| The Vitruvian Man (1487)- Leonardo da Vinci |
Our minds are powerful tools- they can bridge hearing to
listening, seeing to understanding, thinking to feeling. I’ve finally figured
out what countless philosophers have been trying to say. The mind can be trained, just like the outer physical body. With the
right amount of exercise and care, your mind will feel more like a gift than a
weapon. Clarity, motivation, confidence, productivity, kindness, peace > confusion, lethargy, fear, anxiety, cruelty, indifference. Want a better life? All you have to do is start. Trust me, there's not a more perfect time than right now.
Infinitely yours,
KSB
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