This life we live; what an intoxicating, mysterious ride it has turned out to be. I can only speak for myself but I want to believe there is something universal about the human experience. Our greatest, collective attribute may well be language. Imagination comes first then turns words into story. We all have a story. My story seems to me not unlike the butterfly’s, fluttering about the flower garden, sampling nectar from first one blossom and then another, then flitting away to the next and the next, again and again. Each flower yields only a tiny-small drop of nectar. It would seem that life is lived in ever so many, small bites, each one a temporary but necessary precursor to the next. A single life-bite may seem profound or mundane but they all matter. Altogether they fall into place like tile chips in a mosaic. My job is to bring that image to life with words.
Like butterflies with blossoms, I’ve dabbled with purpose and disillusion, belief and doubt, plenty and waste, selfish and selfless; I’ve sampled them all and the story keeps unfolding. I have been content now for some time. Not that I embrace everything or that I have absolute answers but in my own, personal little niche I have more than I need, nearly everything that I want. At this point, when I am disappointed I take comfort in the wisdom of lowered expectations.
Here I go internalizing, waxing prose when I meant to do something else. It would seem the longer you live the more you learn and what had been mysterious would be understood. But mystery can land in your lap at any age, no matter how smart or wise one may be. When it comes to things supernatural, including the paranormal and religion, I have no Big F faith at all. I don’t believe in stories that wander outside of natural law but I concede that there are stories where the explanation is simply unavailable. Those ideas go to the ‘In Progress’ file.
Twenty five years ago, has it been that long: my dad told me there were times when he stepped from the kitchen into the hallway he saw my mother sitting in her designated spot on the sofa. When he turned to look, she would be gone. She had passed, gone maybe 7 or 8 years and his visions of her left him both charmed and saddened. I never doubted that he saw her. I think I how how that works but it wasn’t about me. Dad passed nearly 20 years ago. In the last decade I haven’t seen him but certainly, I have sensed him.
Today, getting out of my truck in the Costco parking lot I turned as I closed the door and stepped around the front of the car parked next door. I barely turned my head and I felt it. Kinesthetics relates to a person’s awareness of the position and motion of body parts. It is controlled by sensory organs in muscles and joints. How is your pinky finger placed in relation to the ring finger beside it? If you can answer correctly without looking, that’s you kinesthetic function doing its job. After unnumbered repetitions of subtle, patterned movements, it feels normal to touch your face in your own particular way. Call it unconscious habit if you like. In bright light, especially if I’ve forgotten my sun glasses, without thinking I naturally turn my head to the left, chin down, close my right eye and squint down at my feet with my left. It’s a patterned behavior that I don’t think about. But every time, I do it exactly that way and sense that it’s uniquely me; yes, this is what I do.
In the Costco lot it was cloudy, no bright light. Walking, my chin moved slightly in the direction I was looking, checking for auto traffic. My kinesthetic control was set on autopilot. Then I felt a weird sensation as if my body had be hacked. It wasn’t the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last but I sensed my dad’s posture and facial expression, in me. There was a disconnect; was I looking through my dad’s eyes or was he looking through mine? It lasted a thin fraction of a second and was gone. The way he pursed his lips agains his teeth, harrowed his eyes and looked to the side; I was doing it. The way he held his arms tight to his sides, elbows bent, hands close together in front; I was doing it. Those two patterns were not me or mine. I had seen him do that countless times over a lifetime. Why was I mimicking his behavior, how did I recognize it so clearly? If I were a mystic I might believe he was trying to get my attention. But then I’m not a mystic.
What I do understand and believe is that genetics has a much greater role in personality and behavior than we were taught back in the nurture vs. nature years. I am science literate. What I don’t understand I am confident that I can find the handle with some diligence and collaboration. I know where my genetics come from and the solution to my conundrum is coded in there somewhere. It’s been going on now for about a decade, maybe 3 or 4 times a year. It can be in the morning between bed to the bathroom or between cars in a parking lot. But it always seems to trigger with the facial tic and the elbows/hands thing. “Frank, this is not your pattern, it belongs to someone else.” Idle smalltalk lends credence to the idea, growing old we turn into our parents. I suspect we have always been our parents.
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