i've been lately thinking

studying sort of half-heartedly for the cognitive science midterm i have in a couple of weeks time - catching up on stuff i got behind in. are humans rational? how is our unconscious processing information? how much do we, can we, really know about how our minds work? is there such a thing as epistemic boundary when it comes to thinking about thinking?

and i know the researchers can't and won't believe in the latter, though for my part, i like the idea of a mysterious core and there being Something More Besides This at work in what we call human (i know, i know, it's suspiciously spiritual. shhh. don't tell). more than that though, sometimes just accepting that things are the way they are - instead of dismantling, dissecting, chasing the whys down infinitely smaller rabbit holes - seems so much more peaceful. of course, this may be simply the purview of the generalist, and god knows i'm a posterchild generalist. i can't help but thinking that there's probably a link between this "let it lie" view and my own resistance to what the psychologists call "expert" knowledge.

but i digress. i had actually sat down to write about the fact that i sometimes like the idea that there's a cohesiveness to my mental world that i'm not fully conscious of. like this morning... i woke to the memory of big snow at whistler and a weekend with an ex-girlfriend. and there's all kinds of conscious reasons for me to be thinking of whistler (jane last night, talking about heading slopewise in a couple of weeks; jen mentioning her guy's compensatory fondness for wintersport and his checking the weather at BC's most famous resort) but this particular memory came up. and it wasn't until i sat in it for a while that i realized that the memory in question would have happened right around this time, give or take a week, four years ago. and i like that despite the fact that i'm not so good with dates and times in my waking life - if it ain't in the agenda, i'm extremely likely to forget - my body is keeping track of at least some trace of where i've been.

i'm not being particularly articulate but i wanted to get this down. all the people i've been and the things i've done are right here. even if i lose the edges of them, even if they blur, even if i think i've forgotten... they're here. and i find that comforting.