“Mind-tracks” (originally posted 1.30.2012)

I was reviewing some old journals before cremating them—gleaning the “important stuff”, like notes taken from all those books I’d read over the years, from the more mundane ramblings and daily grumbles—when I ran across a couple paragraphs that distilled for me what I believed to have been the TRUE reason for writing any of my journals over the years.

My finally reaching a willingness to burn these 20+ years of hand-written pages had only come recently when I arrived at a point where I could “let go” of all that once-valuable-to-me wood pulp and ink. With a single match strike and a puff of black smoke, 20+ years of once-documented living would simply cease to exist.

Why this was so hard for me to do is that as one contemplates mortality one looks for evidence of that which makes one immortal. To me, the journals represented my tiny contribution to the whole of humanity—my thoughts, my words, on those dog-eared pages—all visual evidence of what made me, ME—and presented for all to not see, more likely than see, my take on the world. So the contemplation of my journals’ demise was almost as disturbing as though I were contemplating my own.

But any attachment to anything comes with a price. I finally realized the journals didn’t prove that I existed. They merely followed the process of my growth DURING the time I existed. To move forward now in this latter phase of my continuing developmental process, I had to be willing to ‘let go’ completely of the old phase—the ‘how I got where I presently am’ phase; and I can do that now.

So here’s the setting for the journal excerpt from October 23, 2008: News stories had just hyped a recent find of dinosaur footprints-in-mud in some deserted canyon in Utah or somewhere. Reporters were making quite a case for how the reptilian occupants back then seemed to travel back and forth along that stream bed as though it were a dinosaur-highway of sorts. The point stressed on the news was that if the tracks had not been fossilized in that mud base, we, in the present, would never have evidence that they had existed there at all way back then—eons ago. To this backdrop I wrote:
 

“I may burn all my journals soon. I’ve thought about it a few times. Maybe I’ll keep them as an end-of-life review of what I’ve felt or done, but sometimes I think I keep them just for some solid matter that shows I existed and thought things and felt things and liked the words of others carefully transcribed from their books—books that affected me, inspired me, and helped me cope or move forward with my life, helped me understand or reach higher in some way.

     To me, books are very important, so my journals become important to me as well as they log my experiences and “mind-tracks” as I wander around in the wet-clay streambed between my ears. But actually, the journals are useless to anything but making mind-tracks and I’m the only one who wants to see where those tracks lead. I think they just go back and forth from ear to ear and haven’t figured out how to escape the streambed yet. Someday they will climb that bank and head out over the hill. Then no one will see them anymore. And that’s okay.”

So I am now freeing the dinosaurs from the streambed knowing that it isn’t so much important that we speculate on how they did what and when, but more so important that WE know why we do what we do when we do it.

The past may have gotten us to the present, but it is the NOW that matters to make for a better tomorrow.