Conjugating Verbs and the Momentum of Memory

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I’m forty-nine years old right now and most likely in a few weeks I’ll be fifty years old but that’s just an assumption based on a particular type of momentum called memory. Or hope. Or expectation. I don’t really know.

So I go about my days and drink my tea and get on a bicycle and get home and live a little with my dearest friend and so much else is just a blur.

Sometimes it’s as if I don’t really know my life. Often, I feel like life is a sentence that I can’t put the right words together to make the sentence make sense. Or at least entertain.

The thing is, nouns are the distractions I chase and verbs are the things I’m afraid to live.

Is that the sentence of my life?

How often do I miss the moment, the continuous infinite of now, trying to conjugate the infinitive “to be”?

But these are just words. There is no conjugating a life. It is. It is no longer. Life is Sudden.

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These Things inspired me recently:

  • “People Who Hear Voices in Their Head Can Also Pick Up on Hidden Speech” - This is fascinating! Here’s a taste, “‘There's an increasingly popular theory on how our brain makes sense of the world. Rather than just receiving sensory information passively, our brain is actively making predictions about the world and looking for meaningful patterns,’ says Alderson-Day. The theory called predictive processing or predictive coding posits that a lot of our experience of the outside world is more about what we expect we happen rather than what is actually happening. It may explain, for example, why we tend to see shapes in clouds and Rorschach blots. We experience what we expect to experience, and we only change those predictions or expectations once we have enough evidence forcing our hand.”

  • “Personal Finance Lessons from Benjamin Franklin” - These are contextualized as finance, but may help me be who I’m working to be as a human type person too. Like, understanding the value of things, investing in yourself, and surrounding yourself with friends who share your values.

  • “Liberal Redneck: Y’all Should Vote and Why” - I’ve been enjoying Trae Crowder’s commentary as a liberal redneck and he’s got some interesting views on why it’s important we vote. Even if you don’t feel like your vote matters. Maybe especially if you feel your vote doesn’t matter.

  • “Art is Pretentious” - I highly recommend the YouTube channel “The Art Assignment.” In this self described pretentious video, The Art Assignment gets at the idea that art is pretentious and what really does pretentious mean? Is it good that art is pretentious? For who?

Jeffery Oliver