The Forgotten Toolbox

As I mentioned in my last post, Introduction - Why IWallk, for the last 18 months I have walked to the neighboring town to visit my bank there about once per week.  This is a 10 mile round-trip walk.  I am a writer and most writers know that having time to think is often more valuable than having time to write.  On a recent walk to that bank I paid extra attention to examining my thought processes and how they have been assisted by simple act of walking itself.

Even as a music writer, I often just compose and arrange music in my head.  All composition takes intention and careful thought.  Over the years I have really gotten good at categorizing and and organizing my thoughts in such a way that I know longer worry about losing the more important or novel ideas that come to mind.  I used to feel that I needed to write them down in order not to lose them.  This has really blossomed though since I have been walking.

For various reasons - many that I hope to talk about more specifically in the future of this blog - I have discovered that if ideas are tagged to images or experiences they can be made recoverable with very little effort.  Walking gives me a chance to summon-up and mentally work on past concepts and themes, whether it is to complete these thoughts or simply add and subtract other ideas them.  I've found that even when I'm listening to lectures and podcasts (I don't listen to music on my walks) I can drift in and out of them to also work on my writing. 

In a way, this makes the memory of ideas even stronger.  As I pass by (1) a certain mailbox, and (2) the lecturer on my iPod says, "...nature loves courage..." AND (3) I am composing some audio to be recorded later, I end up remembering and associating all three very vividly together later on.  I find that when I finally sit down to write an essay and use that quote, "nature loves courage," immediately I recall the mailbox I was passing by when I heard the quote, and the song I was working out a guitar part for, all at once.  Sometimes these memory associations are especially productive because they might even have something to do with each other contextually, within a future creative work of some sort.  But most of the time they are not related in any more significant way than simply having occurred at the same time.

This method of remembering what I'm working on and what I'm learning has become second nature to me now.  Every single day's walk presents an opportunity to remember multiple things at once and to store them as a many-leveled concept; sometimes even being interrelated.  I've noted that this has expanded in recent months, with much repetition and practice, to include the weather on the day of the association, what I was doing that day and where I was going, what I remembered a mile back and what I remembered a mile up ahead, what I bought at the store, etc...  Where, so many times before all this 'working while I'm walking' that I have done in the last 2 years, I would use a single mental tab or marker to recall things later that I was not able to write down, now there are whole networks of inter-associated memories that do the job much more efficiently.

Rather than being confusing to navigate through this web of densified memory, I find myself not even having to try to bring back ideas that I feel are important to utilize in my writing or creative work.  And for some reason - I don't know why - the unimportant things and the things that seemed important but ended up being extra fluff seem to be shaved off, as the more important concepts shove them out of the way.  It is a kind of Darwinian process I guess:  Survival of the significant.  Often it makes me wonder if the human mind is actually set up to be used in this fashion.

That I wasn't able to discover it until I had more walking time, has caused me to think that perhaps the many distractions of secondary processes when driving (someone cuts you off in traffic, the song changes on the radio, someone calls or texts you out of the blue, you realize the tank is getting low, you discover you are doing 50 mph in a 10 mph school zone, with its yellow yield lights suddenly flashing in your face - that kind of thing) prevents any kind of prolonged focus on sets of constructive or creative ideas.  Carried further, it really does appear that the more conventional activities we are compelled to do, whether by our own expectations for ourselves or the expectations of others for us, we have really stamped out the function of personal focus. 

When allowed to simply sit and think, or in my case walk and think, it is easy to see how to stay devoted to personal goals.  They can be work-out and achieved in far less time than all the every-day distractions of modern life seem to allow.  What this tells me is that with all of our modern "conveniences" - machines, multimedia communication systems, prepackaged everything -  comes a LOSS of time to achieve personal goals like...happiness for example.  This deficit of time and continual lack of clarity are setting people back in their personal need to feel satisified with themselves.

I don't think this would only be a revelation to creative people, but to ANYONE who cares about the satisfaction of living a life of better self-knowledge (defining one's self by one's own terms and not by the terms of other people), greater goal attainment, clearer philosophical recognition about what truly is important and pushing those more important things to the top of the priority list.

As things stand now, we are enslaved by our conventions.  We perform as machines programmed by society to fill in gaps; to not ask questions about WHY we seem to be required to do the things we do.   The worst part about all of this is that we accept it for the most part without any further comment.  Yes, at the end of the day we bitch and complain about never getting ahead, but then we get right up the next day and begin walking backward again.  We tell ourselves that there is no choice.  And then we go about attempting to prove that same notion to our own conscience, both individually and collectively.

If we really cared about why the American Dream is dying (or already dead), we would act somehow to change our own directions.  It may be easy for me as a single guy without any children to sit here and pontificate about simplifying life.  But, I have thought of many ways in which I could achieve a similar lifestyle with the assistance of a wife and kids.  We do not have to behave as machines.  We can find a state of lessened anxiety even within this broken socio-economic model.  It simply takes THOUGHT.  Yet, as long as we continue accepting our distractions as being "normal" trying to fit into the gaps, believing that there is nothing we can do about the fact that nearly all of our work pays for the sustenance of the very top of the social pyramid, we will continue to be machines--slaves. 

Even our entertainment is set up to constrict our schedules and distract us from choosing our own time management.  The TV is the best example.  It is a drug that takes up an average of 5.5 hours per person, per day.  And to be able to see the latest episode of your favorite sitcom, you need to mold your life around its schedule.  All the while you are ladeling the advertizing of chintzy crap you don't really need into your mind.

TiVo and similar HD recording systems has helped a bit with this.  The Internet also has freed up TV schedules.  I'm not totally blind to the fun of it all.  My ex-girlfriend and I would look forward to our favorite TV schedule like fiends.  I'm sure she still does that wherever she is.  We unquestioning humans love routines with entertainment because we then have even less to think about.  Work and commuting takes up the daylight hours and TV schedules take up the evening hours.  And personal goals are ever-pushed aside.  Everything is set up so nicely, intentionally making us into thoughtless creatures of habit; playing the game.  And I wouldn't complain at all if the game were truly democratic and fair.  But it is a shell game.  It is fixed and polluted, prejudicial and destructive to human dignity.  The game of capitalist morality is destroying the world and hurting billions of people, including you and I, even thought we can harldy see it anymore and are even less likely to ADMIT it to ourselves.  

I never realized how much more could be done by simply getting rid of the boob tube; something I did about 5 years ago.  I can borrow practically any show at the Library.  Or I could do Pay Per View or Netflix online (though, honestly I never do).  Yes, it takes a few weeks for shows to come out on video, but my need to keep up with the water-cooler talk at work the next day about some hot show that was on the night before is just absolutely ZILCH.  I simply don't care at all.  I have found a better world: The hidden world of the GENUINE.

Society does not care for you and me.  There are systems set up and maintained by powerful people to arrest the guy who breaks into your house or put out fires when they happen, plow roads, deliver mail, etc., but even these institutions are just the bottom rungs of a ladder whose direction of financial transport is heavily weighted toward pulling things up to the top, and only minimally and begrudgingly allows enough bare resources to be thrown back down at the unwashed masses, to keep the utilities of life cranking along...barely.  And we can utterly forget about funding social services for the "lower slave classes."  I mean, after all, what did they ever do for any of us in the "middle slave class," besides take our precious tax money; money that "should" be used instead for multi-billion dollar military campaigns and subsidies for fossil fuel addiction?  Even the upper class is a "slave class."  They may be more physically comfortable and not sleeping in doorways, but they are perhaps the most-damned to being constrained by the capitalist religion. In my view they certainly are the most irresponsible as a group, since they are the ones who most-closely maintain the errors of our Western Civilization.

I choose to walk because I can.  It is one of the few powers I have left, a right that has not been regulated out of my control or torn from my white-knuckled hands.  And to walk has actually opened up a whole other toolbox of forgotten human advantages.  I plan to use every tool in this over-looked box, as I have similarly used them to successfully re-invent my own memory process, enhance my creative ability to work and accomplish my personal goals of understanding who I am and what is REAL in this cartoon reality we have erroneously accepted as human life.