Last night, I had some weird thoughts. Sometimes you just… think. Now that I look back, they’re silly, and I really don’t remember about half of them. Once before I realized “it’s always now” and yeah I see you rolling your eyes and lookin’ away, but I expanded on it in two ways that are totally ludicrous: If it’s always the present, then life goes by in an instant. It has to do with memory. It’s difficult to recall what happened in the past. I had my wisdom teeth removed once and the drugs they put me under with made me lose my long-term memory for probably a half hour. If the difference between my usual condition and that memory loss condition is how quickly I can hold onto the past, then time moves through us rather than us moving through time? How quickly can we process thoughts and how would time pass if our short-term memory lasted hours instead of minutes? Like people say, “it’s all relative” and if so, is that the difference between humans and animals? Part of why many animals live shorter lives?

I don’t often experience the feeling of “snapping to attention” but I do know that when I wake up from sleep, it is “the next day” even if technically I’ve only taken a nap and it is still the same day. What happened yesterday is no longer in my immediate thoughts. There is a difference between knowing what’s going on today, and knowing what you’re doing at the moment. At some point, your attention starts over, but you don’t really notice unless you’re on drugs of some kind (or have an attention disorder, probably), and even then, you forget most of everything up until you regain your long-term memory. Can we think greater than we already do? Is there a longer stretch of time that we can utilize for better thoughts? Sometimes I wonder if one day I’m going to wake up and this life was a dream. Sometimes I think my dreams were some other life. Other times I cycle back to the realization that one day I’m going to be much older, and this instant will be long long forgotten to that distant “present.”

Not very sexy, but just thoughts…