Reality vs. Reality

In this primate world I live, I have the common capability of seeing myself as someone other than myself. In this multiprimate view, I can imagine myself in more than one situation. I can "see" previous versions of myself and project them into the current moment, existing as one or more primates now and into the future, too. The possibilities are limited only by the time and energy I spend spinning these fantasies of selfhood.

We believe what we believe. We stand in place, with electrochemical processes taking place automatically, and then we open our mouths or move our bodies in other ways, and project the reality, the worldview, that we carry in our thoughts.

Does it matter how I represent to you the previous moments of my life, using my current set of cultural markers to reinterpret my subcultural cues from times past? I am not the person I was yesterday, having seen new human actions and heard new human phrases, leaving off the other aspects of this universe that passed my cognitive sensing consciously or preconsciously.

In other words, today I feel inadequate. I feel particularly human, warts and all. Part of me wants to sit down and talk with old friends of mine, knowing that we can't go back to who we were when we enjoyed sitting down and talking together, which may or may not exclude that joy again. I have reminisced with some of them via a software application called facebook (myspace and twitter were insufficient for my reminiscing).

Because I am not who I was, I have wants and needs that did not exist when I spent long hours long ago with those old friends (old being relative, literal and figurative). I cannot go back and be another person, which means my wants and needs sit here with me when I think about my old friends. Of course, they're the same way, too, I suppose. None of us are frozen in time and still alive.

So why do I reminisce? Do I want validation? Is it just another form of entertainment for my current self? Does it enrich my future lives, including the "real" one and the fantasy ones? Does it matter why?

I suppose I want to see if I had any influence on those former playmates, schoolmates and work colleagues, and how that influence has manifested itself into today and the near future. My life is a one-shot experiment, the results of which I cannot see after death, thus I must make split-second observations, snapshots that momentarily freeze life in artificial time to show me if what I'm doing makes any sense and thus indicates whether I should move forward with my current actions or make a course correction and move in a different direction.

But should the reactions of others determine what I do? That, as I know, is the issue that dogs me. Am I or am I not a full-fledged member of society or am I only imagining that I exist in and out of society at the same time? Damn those religious influences! Doesn't matter whether it's Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu or some other sect. Religious rituals enrich my life/lives (four-part harmony singing, meditation, etc.) but religious teaching on post-life/extrasensory perception clouds my here-and-now view at times.

I exist nowhere but here in this moment. I can only enjoy this moment. I cannot enjoy the past except as a memory in this moment and the future does not yet exist except as conceptual thoughts in this moment. I am me. I am not the me who could be or the me who almost was or the me who was and won't be again.

But all this doesn't stop me from wondering about friends like Monica (a/k/a Helen), or former lovers like Sarah, or good buddies of mine like Bill, people I haven't seen in years. I can't distinguish the difference between missing the moments I spent together with them or the people themselves since the two will always be intertwined. Instead, all I can do is put our moments down on paper in stories and novels, reread the tales and reminisce, because meeting them again would show them how little or how much they have influenced me, and I admit that bothers me. I do not want to disappoint them, for who I've become is not who I perceive them to be, or who I saw them becoming. Two of them followed the conservative Christian, child-rearing track, while the third lived with another lover for a while and built a concrete-and-glass architectural wonder in the woods.

Seven billion people, all slightly different than the other. Many herd together in sameness, gladly so. Some seek uniqueness and look like other uniqueness seekers. But none of us is exactly like the other, developing neurochemical paths that differ from even our genetically identical siblings.

So why do I fret over my differences? Why do I not celebrate them, instead? Why this frailty, this feeling of inadequacy? Probably something I ate, no doubt, something that shows me once again that I am nothing more than a primate, subject to biological influences I don't always see or can't always control.

If I know I will be nothing more than I am -- skin, hair, wrinkles, itches and all -- and everything else is the same way, whether it's a weather-worn piece of igneous rock or tree cut in half by lightning, or two galaxies ripping each other apart, then why do I carry a belief I should have been something else? The answer: influences from others, from humans who've told me to seek perfection, either here in thought or in the afterlife, or the animals I call pets, such as dogs, cats, birds, and fish, who depend on me for food and shelter.

Biologically, I attribute this inadequacy to the personal absence of breeding and raising my own brood. [Remember, in many ways, we primates are simple, despite our drive to build complex societies.] My friends, Monica, Sarah, and Bill, all bred and raised children of their own. That's what's missing in me when I look at my sister in-law, Pat, and see the beauty in her face that reflects the successful output of her loins in her two children -- I could fall in love with a face like that.

I can no longer fall in love with my face and I miss that feeling of hope for the future, once believing that at any moment I could have a kid but pretty much knowing now that the face looking back at me in the mirror will remain childless, a false view of what life on this planet is all about.

That's why I don't want to profit from my fellow primates -- don't desire to make money selling my writing, or buying and selling stocks/bonds/mutual funds -- because the only true profit is one's children and one's family. I have a family but no children to offer them.

All these books I've read recently about the ego, self and consciousness have reminded me that inner peace, meditation, and all that gobbledy-gook mean nothing, if one is applying these concepts to a childless life.

Everyone is not born to have children. Our genetic complexity means that some people are born without reproductive organs, some are born to be non-heterosexuals and some don't have the mental/physical capacity to bear and raise offspring. I cannot speak for those genetic deviations from the norm because evolution is a curiously blind adaptation technique which has no view of the future except as a concept whereby mutations lead to blind paths, deadends, and occasional breakthroughs. Thus, being childless does not mean one cannot contribute to one's social group, just as many ants tend to a colony but few ants actually reproduce themselves.

I don't have a snapshot that tells me in the phrase, "it takes a village to raise a child," is a portion of villagers who have to remain childless in order to lead successfully to the next generation of children. I can sooth my inadequacy by claiming such is the case, though. Or I can fix a lunch of balanced nutrition which may completely change my outlook later this afternoon.

My friend Monica used to say that reality is only seven letters. Today, I believe she's right.