Where Is My Watch?

"As meditative mindfulness develops, your whole experience of life changes.  Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious, becomes lucid and precise, no longer just an unnoticed background for your preoccupations.  It becomes a thing consistently perceived.  Each passing moment stand out as itself; the moments no longer blend together in an unnoticed blur.  Nothing is glossed over or taken for granted, no experience labeled as merely ordinary.  Everything looks bright and special.  You perceive the universe as a great flowing river of experience.  Your most cherished possessions are slipping away, and so is your very life.  Yet this impermanence is no reason for grief.  You stand there transfixed."  

The italics are mine.

If I take the time to study the human mind and its connection to perception I often find that most of what I perceive as "reality" is really no more than my mind filling in the blanks in a way that it hopes will help us make sense of life, rounding out memories and experiences in a healthy way.  While the mind is impressively large for most of us it's not possible to take in all of the sensory data that is hitting our receptors without becoming overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the information.  So we fill in the blanks.  Our minds take what our senses are perceiving and blends it all together into a narrative that helps us . . . well . . . not freak out.  Our minds take our memories and reconstruct them, smoothing out the rough, unpleasant parts, so that who we are today, who we think we are today, who we want to be today, jives with our past actions.  Most of what we perceive is stored for a short time, a very short time, and then it's junked or our short term memories would be overloaded with crap.  Everything you've ever perceived isn't up there "somewhere," I can assure you of that.

I have one of those hyperactive minds that's always thinking about too many things all at once.  Sometimes I have an impressive recall of something that happened long ago but I also have a distressing and annoying ability to chuck some information that just happened.  I'm allowed to put my phone in one place and one place only.  I can't set it down somewhere randomly or I'll never find it again.  I have a drawer for my watch.  If I take it off it goes in that drawer.  SuperK and I have spent hours looking for things I've misplaced.  She never misplaces anything.  One time we looked for an hour to find my watch which I had slipped off and placed inside my show while I was stretching outside.  Had no recollection of doing that.  The hiding spot was impressive.  It took a long time to find it.

If I'm mindful, if I'm present to the best of my ability, I can remember maybe 30% of my stupid hiding places.  Maybe.  It's a stretch.