Goldfish

The memory is a muscle that works better the more you exercise it. I was thinking about this yesterday after I had finished preparing lunch — thinking that I cook largely from memory and nothing else. What spices and flavours go together and how much of each does a successful recipe contain are all veteran residents in the recesses of my memory. Yet I believe that isn’t a skill — it’s just practice. A skill would be putting my memories and my feelings of them into words and numbers.

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Moody is a good word to describe how I’ve been feeling. Agitated is another. It was only a matter of time, based on past experience, before life (or what used to be) would catch up. I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, and everything is okay. But the pages on the calendar keep turning and my job is to sit by and watch that happen. I do not have the right words to explain how I’m feeling to somebody who is not exclusively a keeper of the calendar. Every day I have to wake up and take the markings on my sundial, flip back the pages on some days and compare how far into time we are. And it’s a cush job. But I’m used to harder things. Did I ever mention this is like playing the easy level of a video game when you know the expert level off the back of your hand? It’s only a matter of time.

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Wasn’t I just talking about muscle memory? I’m going to have to revisit mine from 2012. I think there are many lessons in a past where the choices were few but the aspirations too many. In particular, I’m reminded of how I used to write to meditate and doing so enabled many storms to pass by over my head without harming me. Just that, at my ripening older age, I have to drag myself, kicking and screaming to a notepad, keyboard, phone or the likes and force these hands to write. And that’s all one can do to get out of a rut, I suppose — get up kicking and screaming but get up nonetheless.