It’s Your Journey

I think it’s the nature of human beings to struggle with what is really real when it comes to transformative experiences and impactful coincidences. We give them a weightiness and significance that seems to rise above normal everyday life. And yet they are unprovable because they are individually subjective.

Did I make that up? Was that experience real? Is there something beyond what we see with our eyes that imbues life with meaning? Or are we simply associative creatures applying purpose to things that are just random experiences and events?

I have a new found respect for those who are willing to examine what they have been taught and what they think they believe. Who step out on the plank of skepticism not knowing where it will eventually lead. Who are willing to take that precarious step.

Religious skepticism is serious business. It’s not for the faint of heart. If you like comfort and consistency and predictability it can be disconcerting. A bit like being set asea in a small boat without the visual of land. Because all your life, from your earliest days, your parents and culture grounded you in their historical faith. A faith that explains everything, that gives you guidelines to live by, supplies you with a God who personally cares about what happens, and tells you that if you’re faithful you’ll live forever.

A long time ago I said I didn’t want secondhand belief. I was searching for something that I could actually say I knew was real. I had no idea that that would eventually lead me to questioning everything that I had been taught about God, faith, and religion.

The reason that I’m writing this is to say that life is a process. Everything that happens affects us whether it is something we consider to be a deeply spiritual experience or something traumatic that throws us into a potential existential crisis. These things happen as part of life. It’s normal to want to focus on the things that make us feel safe and push away the things that make us uncomfortable.

I’m not sure where I’m going to land, but I feel like I have this open file box in front of me and I’m sorting through all the stuff I thought I believed about my experiences, unexplainable events, apparent meaningful coincidences, and basic beliefs. It’s like a bunch of old ticket stubs, notes written on scratch paper, and straggly bits of string. I’ve decided to try make sense of it all, put it in alphabetical order, and get rid of all flotsam and jetsam.

We’ll see where I end up with it all. But as a wise woman said to me not long ago, “It’s your journey.”

Story Creatures

​I have the best sister in the world. Periodically she sends me articles she knows will pique my interest. Just the other day she sent me one on a new NIH study that revealed how the human brain separates, stores, and retrieved memories. This interests both of us as it was only a year ago this coming Wednesday that our Mom passed from Alzheimer’s disease.

This new study is the first to apply direct recording of neurons that generate actual thoughts in humans. Pretty exciting stuff! What they are finding is that although we live our lives as one continuous experience we actually store memories of that experience as individual distinct moments. This process is referred to as “event segmentation”.

I won’t go into the details of the study itself, but I will tell you our memories have two different cognitive cell boundaries. “Soft boundaries” that function like movie scene cuts in a single story, and “hard boundaries” that separate different stories altogether.

The study only gets more complex from there, but it got me to thinking about how fundamentally basic story is to human life. We are, it seems to me, story based creatures. We not only see our lives as a continuous story, but our belief systems and personal relationships find their meaning and purpose in the stories we tell ourselves.

As an analogy think of it this way. Your life is a book. That book has chapters. Tons of them. There’s one about your childhood, one about your schooling, one about your spouse and children, one about your working career, one about what you do for fun, one about your spiritual beliefs, who your friends are, what you’re doing in retirement, and so on.

Those chapters have cohesive moments that hang together as paragraphs, single cohesive thoughts on pages that connect to other cohesive thoughts on following pages that document the movement of story to the next chapter. All those chapters, all those pages, are all held together by the “book binding” of the cognitive cells in the library of our brain.

At the end of my mother’s life she could no longer distinguish between individual stories. The ones she had endlessly told all her life became jumbled without the benefit of those cognitive boundaries to organize them. It’s as if the binding had broken in her brain. The stitching that held the pages together had come undone. Her story pages were falling out in no particular order or sequence and there was no way to repair it.

When she died we were left with the memory of all her wonderful stories. We still tell them. They have become our stories as well. We took them in and added to them and made them our own and now we share them with those younger family members. When we’re gone they will tell them as well. That’s how it works. That’s how life is. We are all part of the great story of humankind. We write our own chapters, but that Book? That Book is going to be amazing.