Startled connections - continued

I read back over that and I see why my mother was concerned I might be going mad. It doesn't make much sense. I wrote without thought - a very nice lesson in why thought should precede sharing of brain-content. Though this is something my dear brothers have been trying to teach me since I was small...

My previous post may suggest that my focus is on the 'critical mass' of something, but it wasn't. I can't even remember what the guy was talking about - something to do with banking - and it's no longer massively important. What struck me was the selection of 'Reading' in his example, out of all the towns in England, why would he choose one that had no relevance to him, but huge relevance to me? It got me to thinking about how we seek or see significance in our daily lives. It can be unbearable to think that there is no purpose, or meaning, or greater design. It can create a physical sensation of heightened awareness and a sense of aimless floating in the vast space we inhabit - the universe. A pang of existential angst, perhaps. We don't see and hear everything around us - we focus only on the specific things in our line of vision and the specific words in sentences that have relevance to our lives or to ourselves, and we ignore the rest.

The thing is, our memories are not big enough, generally, to retain all the details, so we have to be selective. Life is about taking opportunities and choosing different paths. My 'golden strands' were metaphorical - in my minds eye I was seeing opportunities as golden threads that are held out to us and if we choose to accept them, we follow the strand. My friend in Hong Kong offered me one such golden strand that influenced the course of that year. Life is - to my mind - composed of these little golden strands that people offer to us, that may change the path we are currently on. Like when my mother met my father in England - he offered her one such strand and she took it and her life moved to the UK from Croatia.

Science is important, but even science teaches us that it's not just the visible things that matter and influence our lives. It's the tiny or invisible things that have as great an influence as, if not more than, the visible - the subconscious, the pre-verbal memories, strings and quarks. They're all there, they exist, and there is nothing mysterious about any of them - it's just that most of us don't quite understand the stuff we don't see on a daily basis. And why? Because there is only so much we can focus on, so we select that which feels relevant, make connections between the relevances and keep hold of them as one unit of experience - our lives - discarding all that which feels unimportant or irrelevant. It's called simplifying.

I'd better get on with work...