I was in an elevator last evening going up and down for no reason, when a random remembrance popped into my head. I couldn’t figure out the reason. It was a memory that had no special or for that matter, any significance to me. It just suddenly showed up, like an uninvited house guest and overstayed its welcome. Finally I dismissed it, but later I was wondering how do these things occur? If I wasn’t consciously thinking about it, where did it come from? Why would this memory come to me, why now, why would it enter my brain? I doubt I was subconsciously thinking about it. It was just some silly thing that had no impact on me but occasionally pops into my head. This made me wonder about the things people think about sometimes.
We’re on automatic pilot a lot. We don’t even think about what we are going to say sometimes, it just comes out, sometimes it’s stupid and once in a great while, it’s frickin’ brilliant. But why are certain thoughts recalled by the mind at certain times with no prompting? Especially thoughts that are meaningless? What controls this? Why do we start humming a song sometimes without even thinking about it? I don’t have the answers and I don’t think anyone does no matter what they say. Surely some things can be attributed to habit, but I am thinking of the things that occur out of nowhere. The mind works in strange ways, you know like God, or so they say. There must be regions of the mind that go untapped, or regions that contain a cache of memories that for some reason bubble up from time to time without any prompting. Things that we haven’t thought about in years or necessarily have wanted to think about. There are many components that we do not have any control over. It is as if when we were born, we were programmed a certain way. I find it odd that certain things are long ago forgotten and never touched again and others remain in reach of the thinking mass I wish we could be more selective about the things we could choose to remember, or forget. We can’t remember important stuff, but we remember dumb stuff.
We probably all have happy memories of things that have faded and are no longer reachable, like some photographs that can’t be recognized no longer. They would be sure to bring us some moments of joy or contentment if we could only recall them. Memories of people who are no longer with us. Memories of events, perhaps trivial in the great grand scale of things, but an event nonetheless that meant something to us at one point in our life. So too, we have less pleasant, even painful memories that we cannot forget. Memories that we wish we could exorcise from our minds forever. The mind is a dark place and there are many portions of it that have yet to have a light shined upon them. All the philosophers and doctors of the world have never been there, or will likely ever go.
