I don't think we realize how relative everything is. We don't let ourselves think about it. We try to make everything concrete, objective, quantifiable. We need things to make sense, so we arrange a constellation of references and landmarks neatly around ourselves and ignore the fact that we only see them from one fixed point of view.
We lock into these angles as tightly as we can, because the only way we know where we are is by comparing our position relative to everything else in our lives, from an atomic microscale all the way up. If our perspective started to slip, we'd lose track of our identities. And sometimes that happens. You've probably had that feeling of falling in a metaphysical sense. Like gravity has shifted away from the familiar downward pull and is beginning to reassert itself in a different direction. Like everything is flying past you in a blur. Like time has stopped for you but sped up for everyone else. These feelings usually start for me with a strange sensation that my emotions have shifted into physical form; crystallized in my chest, pushed aside muscle and bone, and cut something in my core.
That sudden disconnect kicks me into a surreal state where my perception of time and self alters significantly. Days seem to drag on forever, but weeks go by like ticks of a clock. My life becomes one of those artsy time-lapse scenes from romantic comedies, where the protagonist sits motionless at a bar while the world speeds around him, only I generally don't get the mournful acoustic ballad playing over the top. Under normal circumstances, we don't notice the motion, just like we don't notice the rotation of the earth; because we're held by its gravity, locked into relative movement. But unlike that rotation, our relation to the universe is all in our heads. Everything's hurtling around us at impossible speeds, but we've learned to pick things out of the storm and keep our eyes on them, giving us the illusion of place and stability.
But the point is, if any of this sounds familiar to you, you've had a slip of perspective. Normally, we move at a steady rate in one direction, the objects and beliefs that make up our worldview orbiting around us. But if we stop for a minute, those things don't stop with us. They keep moving at the same rate, and suddenly everything looks wrong. Foreign. Even if we don't stop for long, there's a sense of unfamiliarity when we begin moving again. We're creatures of habit, and we come programmed with a deep obsessive compulsion buried somewhere in our brains that grows accustomed to having everything in its place. This part of our consciousness develops a dependence on patterns and recurrences, and goes through withdrawal if faced with change of any sort, with the side effect of a kind of existential disorientation.
Sometimes these slips happen suddenly, and sometimes they gradually build while we're not paying attention, and when we discover that something is out of place, it wakes us up to a sudden awareness that nothing is quite where we left it. Either way, these crises of self-location can be devastating. As I've spoken about to some extent previously on this blog, I went through a particularly harsh example a few years back, when my first love and I split. It was like going to sleep in your own bed and waking up on the rings of Saturn.
Previously, I had convinced myself that one of the reasons that loss was so debilitating for me was that I hadn't established my own identity within myself yet; that I'd built my concept of self on someone else, and that when she left, I was left not knowing who I was, and while there's probably a great deal of truth in that, I don't think that was the sole cause anymore. I think I'd settled firmly into the idea of that specific set of circumstances as 'real' and 'right', and then suddenly, my perspective changed. I stopped and they continued moving, and when I looked up, they were far ahead, taking with them everything that I understood.
This happened again for me with yet another love lost not long ago, and I keep feeling that familiar sense of standing in a billion-mile-per-hour wind. I'm not being buffeted by it as badly this time around, but it's still not my favorite place to be, haha. In any case, I find that I'm trying to re-establish perspective.
Perspective. It's more fascinating to me than ever, because right now I have a pretty clear view of things. And there's something amazing about it. Perspective is a purely human creation. We have found a way to draw order out of chaos, simply because our strictly regimented brains NEED order. How amazing is that?
I also find our relation to previous perspectives interesting. Our minds store little snapshots of certain perspectives we once had, and sometimes, without warning, our brains bust out the photo album and start flipping through. Sometimes it's triggered by a familiar formation of circumstances that looks kind of like one we used to have, sometimes it's totally random. But I occasionally have these oddly specific, incredibly vivid nostalgia spikes out of nowhere. It's the nearest thing to time travel we have right now. Images, feelings, smells, whatever; sometimes they all come flooding in, and they're often of the most obscure things. Not momentous happenings, just... moments. Flashes of history. Most things fade in our brains with time, edges worn down by the endless tumble of thought, but these remain untouched.
Yesterday, I was in the midst of working when one of these hit me with meteoric force for no apparent reason. I'm not sure what triggered it, but suddenly, it was late in the fall. I was eight or nine years old, and it was a blue, chilly, dying evening quickly giving way to night. The sun had fallen behind the mountains a few minutes ago, and daylight was quickly fading. We'd been adding on to our house, and my parents were working. I was sitting on a large plastic bundle that contained pink fiberglass insulation (one of several sitting on our front lawn between our house and the apple trees, playing Pokemon Yellow on my Game Boy. I distinctly remember that I was in Viridian Forest in the game. Above me, despite the chill in the air, there were small clouds of gnats roiling about. It was almost too dark to see the screen, but I kept playing anyway, eyestrain be damned. There was an indescribable scent in the air. I don't think I can explain it; it resists verbalization, but it was... crisp, and sharp.
It's odd; these memories always have a unique, associated scent that is distinct and clear, but somehow unattainable; like I know that even if it's a familiar scent, I'll never be able to smell it that WAY again. Sometimes I have a strange yearning, like if I could just somehow smell that fragrance that same way now, it could transport me back there for a few minutes, or make things better somehow. That we even have perceptual memory and perspective in our olfactory system is bizarre and fantastic.
Nostalgia carries with it a longing that is destined by the laws of physics to be unrequited. Even if we don't want to do things differently, I think there are places and moments in our lives we'd all love to return to, just to experience them again. To walk in the shoes of our younger selves. To look around us and see things for just a few minutes from a perspective we've long since lost in the chaos. Things change within us and things change around us, and usually, we feel like they all change without us. And we never know in these moments which ones are going to take root in our minds and reappear down the road. I very clearly remember that moment when I was eight or nine, and it wasn't laden with significance. It didn't even feel special at the time. It was just an ordinary day. But when we redefine the ordinary so often, even mundane things can have a powerful effect on us down the road.
When my viewpoint takes hold once again and coalesces into whatever shape it takes, I can't help but wonder which experiences and moments from the last year or two will lodge in my memory. What will soften and fade with time? What about this time will strike me out of nowhere ten or fifteen years from now? The only way to find out is to wait and see, and try to find order in the chaos.
