i wish i knew. i'm certainly suffering from a slight case of it this morning. ever since my night in the hospital a couple summers ago, i've been afraid of strokes. no, i didn't have one, low sodium instead, the state marathon runners can die from. and last night i started losing my balance, every once in awhile, shifting to the left a bit. not dramatic, yet the buried, traumatic memories have me shaky on my feet this morning.
so, what did i do? drank water and juice with a shot of salt. okay, at least my sodium should jump. then, bright idea, take my blood pressure. damn, it's higher than it should be. was it the newly imbibed sodium? now i have to wait until that possibility wears off. otherwise, i'm too focused on controlling the moves of my body, when they should come naturally.
that is stagefright, for sure. too much attention to my physical self, it brings up fears for my survival. keep moving and don't fall. my doctor likes to repeat this conundrum against aging. and supposedly the fear of falling our most basic, a remnant of the first toddler steps taken. and by the way, what keeps us going anyway?
i'm always amazed by a child learning to walk, the drive to do so. and in answer to my question, who am I? all i can answer is "I am made of my memories." yes, true enough. when the brain goes, everything does, a library is lost. and who is the librarian who knows where to find the memory of walking, of trips to greece, of love-affairs both delighting me and dropping me into despair?
strangely, there's no answer. nobody knows what the integrative factor 'consciousness' is. the pieces of the puzzle are all scrambled in the box. we call it 'the self' and how illusive can that be? i know something screens us from being overwhelmed by stimuli as schizophrenics are. 4 billion fragments of the universe hit our eyeballs every second, and we're capable of noticing 40, when the shield is up.
and what we are is limited to what gets through our defenses. some rocket scientist in us shoots down 3 billion, 999 million, and so on, impulses trying to reach us. who he or she is, i have no idea, and when i think about it, i get dizzy, like i am a bit this morning. certainly, i could credit it to a touch of the divine, the spark we lose with disintegration.
when i encounter anything new, my immediate reaction: is it dangerous, can i eat it, have sex with it? obviously, this is the first line of defense, and i depend on memory to straighten things out. if that doesn't work, i turn to science: does it have cells, is it breathing? if that doesn't work, i turn around an run, not always the best solution.
here i am an the end of my inquiry, with no answer. all the important questions have none. time to take myself up and walk.
epilogue: next time read the label, stupid.
