So, as some of you may know from watching my vlogs, (click here if you want to see the vlog where I talked about where the rest of this post is going), I’ve been taking two college-level classes this summer: social psychology and advanced creative writing. I have taken creative writing classes in the past, so I thought this would just be another one of them: come into class, write about a prompt, share said prompt, break, write some more, get homework, and leave.
Wow, was I wrong.
My teacher, whose name I will keep from the internet world for now, (but let’s just call him Mr. Williams), is really into meditation and enlightenment and zen and “Om” and on our second day of class, we had a discussion and talked and stuff and he basically shocked me with everything he had to say. So, naturally, on the hour-long train ride back home, I took out my blue composition book, my blue pen, and started writing. In cursive. Which I haven’t done since the fifth grade. I wrote the whole way home, and I filled up two pages, front and back.
You could say I was pretty enlightened.
Or, was I?
Here’s what I had to say:
“…today we learned about memories and Siddhartha and enlightenment. It wasn’t very interesting at first, since Mr. Williams started off reviewing what we had read in the book and then started asking us odd questions such as, ‘What would you change about society today?’ or, ‘Are memories important?’ He called on me for the first question, to which I responded with something stupid like, ‘…I think society has this perception of what people should be, and people tell you to ‘be yourself’, but they really mean being yourself, but society’s view of your ‘best self’, if you kinda understand what I mean?’
Yeah. Real eloquent.
…We watched this documentary called ‘Unknown White Male’. It’s about this guy named Doug Bruce, who, one day, suddenly forgot who he was. He woke up one day on a New York subway train and got off at Coney Island not knowing his name or who he knew in life or what he was doing there. …Doug had no episodic memory, which is memory that deals with a person’s interactions with the world and other people and themselves. (He still knew behaviors and processes from his past life, however, like riding a bicycle.)
When we were 41 minutes in, Mr. Williams stopped the movie and asked, ‘Would you want to Doug-Bruce-it? Would you want to see the world with the eyes of a newborn baby but process it with an adult mind?’
Personally, I wouldn’t want to…I need to be able to know who I love, because what if I don’t love the people the people that are worth loving when I’ve got amnesia? How am I supposed to remember the feelings and history I had with people? Am I supposed to relearn all that? …What’s the purpose of memories? If people think that memories are useless, why have we been gifted with the power to remember them? Memories are there to remind us who we are…and if we lose those memories, we essentially lose ourselves, our being, our meaning.
And then after we’d discussed my teacher took a moment before pointing at the chalkboard that said ‘Doug-Bruce-it?’ and he said, ‘That’s enlightenment.’
That just awed the entire class. I was sure right down dumbfounded….I spent the whole walk down to the train thinking about it, and I’ve been amazed by it so much that now I’m writing about it. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that he’s correct. Enlightenment does mean you need to get rid of your past self…In order to be truly happy, you need to be able to let go of people and stay disconnected…
Enlightenment would be pretty cool, I guess, if it means opening your eyes to a brand new world and awakening anew. A clean slate, a blank canvas, new memories to be made. That would be nice…not a care in the world other than seeing the beauty and wisdom in everything around you. I can see it now: the fresh air with every breath I take, the freeing feeling of not belonging to anyone, no obligations or responsibilities, just me and the echoing earth.
But, then again, if being enlightened comes with the hefty price of losing all that and who you love, then how much would you be willing to pay for enlightenment?”
Hope you enjoyed this post; it’s quite different from what I usually write about but I felt like being a bit reflective and philosophical. 🙂
Love you all! ❤
~Annika
dameannika 