As part of our trip to England, South Africa and India we had an opportunity to take a day trip to Salisbury, Bath and Stonehenge.
Stone henge is mindbogglingly surreal. Is it a time recording device, a measure of time passing, who knows.
I have always been fascinated with time, so much so that one of my major assignments in high school was based on time. I researched the great philosophers who have examined the concept of time through the ages, Galileo, McTaggart, Newton and others. I’ve read books on time, my favourite is Felt Time; The Psychology of How We Perceive Tine by Marc Wittman as mentioned earlier. It’s a fascinating read. I explored the different theories of time, but this last few days I have looked inwardly and understand more than ever the importance of time.
We always think we have time. We are always saying to a friend, let’s catch up next week. Or we look at a job we need to do at home and we say tomorrow.
Life is made up of seconds, which turn into minutes, which turn into hours…you get the picture. This book is littered with memories of mine that are linked to present day experiences as I journey through my personal grief. Some memories are so strong it is as if they occurred ten minutes ago. Other are distant, foggy even.
Do a little test yourself. Can you remember what you did fifteen days after the end of your honeymoon? How about four days after your 21st birthday? I know I can’t. But I can remember vividly the look on Mardi’s face the warm sunny day of our wedding as I picked her up in the silver stretch LTD, her pink dress, silver shoes, my grey suit with a long jacket and black shiny shoes. The pop of the champagne cork in the back of the car, the drive from our place down William Hovel Drive to Marcus Clark Street. The driver stopping so we could take a photo over-looking the Brindabella’s. The memory is so real, so alive with me still, but it’s over 12 years ago.
Humans and most advanced vertebrates are fitted with a pretty cool device. It’s called the Amygdala. Commonly described as an almond shaped and sized piece of brain located deep in the temporal lobe.
What this little gem of evolution does is add slices of time to critical events in our life. Think of the old black and white TV and the resolution they use to put out. Now compare that with today’s ultra-high definition TVs. All of those extra lines of detail that allow us to pick up much more detail in the picture. That’s exactly what the Amygdala does.
In effect, it is the thing that we often turn into words when we say, “it is like time slowed” as we describe an event to a friend. Maybe we are describing a car crash we saw or were in, or we are watching a child fall into a pool and a parent runs to her rescue.
Those moments in our life are captured in much more detail than the “dull days” as Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters so sarcastically called them. I’ve learned a way how to trick, trigger the Amygdala into helping me remember the so called dull days and turn them into vivid, crisp memories.
I call in sensating. Wittman calls it cultivating presence. Sensate means perceiving by the senses. You actually have to experience the moment in time, the event, the thing. By doing that you can create a more vivid memory and richer experience.
That is exactly what I did that day. I stood and listened and cultivated presence in the field a yard or two from a large stone. I closed my eyes and listened to the ghosts of the past. The wind swirled around the stones, making a variety of whistling sounds, the groans of the ghosts, It is an incredibly eerie place, its quiet and if you separate yourself from the people who just take a happy snap and talk away the experience you can really feel a sense of history.
It is something that will sit with me for a lifetime.
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