You forget. It’s really a simple thing, this forgetting. You do something, or think something, and moments later it’s gone. Poof! Gone. Whole conversations are lost or changed or morphed into something entirely different from their original essence.
Take for instance the notion that I just spent half an hour constructing a lovely post, only to purposely wipe out the entire text with just a couple of keystrokes. Control A, Delete. It was that easy — and there’s no Oops! key in this software program. No return. No remembrance. Just Gone Baby Gone.
I read once that in ancient days … when folks wrote their thoughts onto mashed up plant matter instead of The Internets … it was considered that our feelings and memories were kept in the stomach. Questions and doubts were in the head. The will was in the heart, the soul resided in the throat. The Spirit was in the breath, mindfulness in the ears, observance in the eyes.
It all makes sense. Especially the thing about memories in the stomach. Already I don’t remember specifically what I spent a half hour writing, but I sure know the kick in the stomach feeling I had the moment after pressing delete.
I think great thoughtfulness must inhabit every sheet, every scroll of our ancient Papyrus writings. By the time you harvested the plant, soaked it, smushed it, rolled it and dried it … you’d have a pretty good idea what you’d want to write on its surface. Your inky words would spill onto your parchment and dry in the breeze. They’d be stones of thought that would last a very long time before finally crumbling into dust.
Your words would be your strength.
I think we should write until we die. On paper. Every day. Even if it’s nonsense and we forget how to form letters and our memories turn to pebbles in our stomachs. Every day we should breathe our spirits onto paper. Every day.
If we remember anything, may it be that for what we write now, it will one day be ancient thought.