Affectivity

The Mind:  The non-material substance or set of processes in which consciousness, perception, affectivity, judgement, thinking, and will are based. 

I have been holding my father in my mind right now.  I try to pay homage to all of my relatives who influenced my development during my morning Quiet Time.  I allow my mind to roam about during my afternoon meditation sessions.  I don't try to control my thinking or force it into shapes or patterns; I don't judge it or label it; what comes and goes and happens is not right or wrong.  It is a mind and it wants to think - that is what minds do.

There is some joy in this and there is some pain.  Sometimes in my mind I walk through my childhood home or the places my grandparents lived or dad's last apartment.  Some of these spaces I can reconstruct as if I was standing there.  I can see them decorated for holidays, imagine their differences in cold weather and hot, fill them with long-gone people.  It can be pleasant and it can be unpleasant.

Sometimes I'll walk into a room, engrossed in thought, and imagine that a shoe or book on the floor, caught out of the corner of my eye, is my beloved cat, dead almost two years.  I keep flashing on the Buddhist graves right in the middle of the Vietnamese rice fields, accessible to everyone on a daily basis as they trudge merrily out to work under the scorching sun.  I don't want to forget all of these things but I don't want to linger on them overmuch.

Living in the past.